Interviews – Kindred Mediahttp://kindredmedia.org
Sharing the New Story of Childhood, Parenthood, and the Human FamilyTue, 28 Nov 2017 00:08:31 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.1Transgenerational Trauma And Cross-Cultural Insightshttp://kindredmedia.org/2017/10/transgenerational-trauma-cross-cultural-insights-interview-dieudonne-allo/
http://kindredmedia.org/2017/10/transgenerational-trauma-cross-cultural-insights-interview-dieudonne-allo/#respondMon, 23 Oct 2017 15:54:59 +0000http://kindredmedia.org/?p=20613In this video, David Metler, a contributing editor for Kindred Media, talks with Teresa Graham Brett of the Parent Liberation Alliance and Dieudonne Allo of Global Leading Light Initiatives. Dieudonne shares his story of growing up in Africa and then questioning, as an adult, trauma’s effect on himself, his community and the young people he […]

]]>SUPPORT THIS PROJECT WITH YOUR TAX-DEDUCTIBLE DONATION. The Parent Liberation Alliance is the American nonprofit initiative that partners with international NGOs and organizations to facilitate the Parent Liberation Project, founded by Teresa Graham Brett, JD, author of Parenting for Social Change.

In this video, David Metler, a contributing editor for Kindred Media, talks with Teresa Graham Brett of the Parent Liberation Alliance and Dieudonne Allo of Global Leading Light Initiatives. Dieudonne shares his story of growing up in Africa and then questioning, as an adult, trauma’s effect on himself, his community and the young people he worked with as a professional. Teresa shares her story of becoming a social justice attorney and then realizing when she became a mother, how the roots of the dominator culture were transmitted to children – through parents. (Listen to Teresa talk about this insight in a Kindred interview here.)

Allo and Teresa explore the known Transgenerational Trauma in American and African cultures, while sharing their stories of bringing education and healing to families through their nonprofit collaborative projects. These stories are touching, hopeful, and point to a human family path toward wellness – one that may one day break the patter of Transgenerational Trauma for good.

]]>http://kindredmedia.org/2017/10/transgenerational-trauma-cross-cultural-insights-interview-dieudonne-allo/feed/0Parenting For A Peaceful World Goes To China: An Update With Robin Grillehttp://kindredmedia.org/2017/09/parenting-peaceful-world-goes-china-update-robin-grille/
http://kindredmedia.org/2017/09/parenting-peaceful-world-goes-china-update-robin-grille/#respondFri, 15 Sep 2017 18:54:00 +0000http://kindredmedia.org/?p=19166Caption: An EDiversity mother in Hong Kong shares her experience of discovering Parenting for a Peaceful World during her challenges with breastfeeding her child. Watch the full video below of EDiversity mothers talking about Parenting for a Peaceful World. Then listen to Robin Grille share his response to the book’s translation by the Hong Kong homeschooling […]

]]>Caption: An EDiversity mother in Hong Kong shares her experience of discovering Parenting for a Peaceful World during her challenges with breastfeeding her child. Watch the full video below of EDiversity mothers talking about Parenting for a Peaceful World. Then listen to Robin Grille share his response to the book’s translation by the Hong Kong homeschooling group as well as ten years of insights and travels with the seminal book.

About the Interview With Robin Grille

Artist Carrie Chau poses with the cover painting for 【善養小童成大同】Parenting for a Peaceful World by Robin Grille

Robin Grille shares his journey with a homeschooling group in Hong Kong, EDiversity, who have fought for Parenting for a Peaceful World to be translated into Catonese and distributed in China in 2017. Robin shares his insight into cultural changes happening in China and around the world at this time. He believes the “backlash” experience to the dying dominator and authoritarian models (Old Story) of parenting, education, culture, and government are breeding last gasp grabs for power as humanity’s New Story emerges.

Robin covers his talk at the UNICEF Baby Friendly Initiative in England and his presentation at the Healthy Birth, Healthy Earth Sumit at Findhorn, Scotland. He throws in the kitchen sink with insights from PFPW, guidance from his book Heart-to-Heart Parenting, and his admonition to all activists to “not look for predictions of the future but to set their intentions for how they want it to be” and work in that direction together.

Robin is a contributor editor to Kindred and a co-creator of its Children’s Wellbeing Manifesto. This is a fun and epic interview with one of the most celebrated thought leaders of the conscious parenting movement.

Watch EDiversity mothers talk about their excitement about reading Parenting for a Peaceful World together. Click Closed Caption option for translation:

PARENTING FOR A PEACEFUL WORLD GOES TO CHINA!

A TRANSCRIPT OF THE ABOVE AUDIO INTERVIEW

LISA REAGAN: Welcome to Kindred Media and Community. This is Lisa Reagan and today I am talking with Robin Grille, author of Parenting for a Peaceful World and Heart-to-Heart Parenting. Robin’s book Parenting for a Peaceful World is slated to be translated into Cantonese and distributed in China next year by EDiversity (see their video above). Today, we’re going to cover the origins of the book, how it has been received worldwide in the past eleven years, and where Robin has traveled with his message recently. So welcome, Robin.

ROBIN GRILLE: Hi, Lisa, it is really good to be speaking with you again. It has been a while.

LISA REAGAN: It has been a while. We have a big update ahead of us and I look forward to sharing all of your great news with everyone.

ROBIN GRILLE: Well, that was just a really lovely surprise to receive a communication from a group that I was not aware of their existence. They are a very, very vibrant homeschooling group in Hong Kong. They call themselves EDiversity. I think it probably stands for educational diversity.

They are part of a backlash I suppose you could say against a real high pressure cooker-style of education that seems to predominate in East Asia, in China, in Korea, or in Japan: long hours, extraordinary amounts of homework, and enormous pressure to perform highly. You know, things are so competitive. There are ways of dysfunction that comes from that. Kids that are just breaking down psychologically and it results in all kinds of things including bullying, like high rates of bullying, school refusal.

So against that background is this wonderful, progressive, incredibly dynamic group of families that are banding together around the book and just protecting their right to educate as they want at home. They are really educated parents. They are all professional. A lot of them are teachers and they are just putting their foot down and saying “no more of that for my child.” So somehow, somebody there got ahold of my book.

You know, this is the age of the internet I guess and nothing is hidden anymore. They were so enthused by my book Parenting for a Peaceful World and the sense of the manifesto that it provides for reform of child-rearing and education and the difference that is already making in the world. So they tried really hard to find me a publisher in the Chinese world. We had a few publishers turn us down. I tell you, they were absolutely relentless, relentless. There was never going to be a plan that they gave up.

LISA REAGAN: Wow.

ROBIN GRILLE: I am quite blown away, really, by the enthusiasm and the hunger and the determination to make change. They see my book as one of the tools that they really want in their arsenal. I also started having mixed feelings because I began to learn that for my book to go into mainland China, I don’t think that it would have the respect of a faithful translation and I think that my message was very much at risk of being diluted or edited or changed and there is no way in the world that I want to live with that. I would rather the book just be put to sleep before somebody puts a different message to my name. I said no, no more, I don’t even want that to happen. If my book never makes it into mainland China, then you know, that’s okay by me. But we came to an arrangement where EDiversity have become the publisher and in their hands, I trust them implicitly, explicitly, unblinkingly. They have my absolute faith. I know them. They’re good people. You know, they’re fierce. Gosh, it’s such a joy to work with them. They had to raise the money by crowd funding.

LISA REAGAN: Oh, wonderful.

ROBIN GRILLE: Because they really want to print by demand. They want to have stock of the book on paper. They’ve got wonderful people helping out and donating and backing it and beautiful artists and who said, “Look, I’ll provide the artwork for the cover, etc.” What a great pleasure. It is going to be in Cantonese. You know, China is not just China. The Chinese speaking world is everywhere. You have got them in Indonesia, Malaysia, parts of Africa, all over North America, as you know, Australia, New Zealand. There are Cantonese speakers everywhere. So I am really thrilled.

The West Imports Tiger Mom as The East Now Imports Conscious Parenting

ROBIN GRILLE: Oh, wow, Lisa, that’s exactly what is happening in Australia. I am hearing from school teachers that say, we don’t really believe in giving homework to primary school children. We don’t like it, we don’t agree with it, but we just get so much pressure from our immigrant families from East Asia who get angry with us if we are not giving enough homework and if we’re not really getting on the kids and pushing them hard. So there’s a lot of this cultural change that is going in that direction driven by immigration and – you’re right – that at the same time, in the mean time in East Asia, they’re saying we’re sick of this. We don’t want to become American or English, nor should they ever be, but the way that they’re freeing themselves from their traditions is in their own style and there is a great hunger and drive for democratizing family and school.

Now, the thing that I am really fascinated by is the growing sense that I have been given that there is something a little bit like the 1960s going on in China, that is growing and developing. There is a tremendous hunger for new ideas that break with the old. There is a new way of doing gender relationship and new ways of doing politics and new ways of doing everything. They are not just going to copy what happens in California or New York right in the 1960s, so you’re not going to get the same kind of thing; they’re going to do their own thing. That’s exactly what we would want. But it means that some big changes are at foot and boy are they hungry for new and they will take it from anywhere in the world where it serves them.

I have spoken to writers and therapists in the western world who are being discovered in China and being taken from. They take the ball and they run with it. You know, we got to wonder. We have got to be curious about what is that going to do to Chinese society? What can we extrapolate here? Because you know from my book that you cannot change childhood without changing all of society afterwards. It’s just one leads to the other.

LISA REAGAN: Well, let me just pause right here, because this is what I want to do just in case anyone listening is unfamiliar with Parenting for a Peaceful World. If you could just give us a quick overview of it and then go back to telling us how you see it impacting Chinese culture and families potentially.

ROBIN GRILLE: Do you mean what would I hope for or what my dream is?

LISA REAGAN: What would you hope for?

ROBIN GRILLE: Yeah. The first thing that I need is as much humility as you can deliver in a truck because they will do what they do. They will do what they do. The only way that they will do it is in their own way because there is no other way. And having said that, whatever is authoritarian, whatever is authoritarian in families and in school becomes toxically authoritarian in government and in business and I would like to see that dissolve in China in the same way that I want to see that disappear more and more and more from every other country in the world, every other culture.

Because authoritarianism and patriarchy is at the very center of what is causing us to destroy our planet and to put ourselves at risk of self destruction too. All of our problems can be traced down to that at its very center. The interpersonal dynamic of power over, one person having power over another is corrupt and it is violent and only violence and corruption can come from it in the end.

So, if somebody in the Chinese universe can use my book as a part of a library of resources for neuro-social evolution that can remove authoritarianism and every fear in human life, I would be ecstatic about that, absolutely ecstatic. I think the whole world would benefit. People in the west have become accustomed to speaking about China in fearful terms and, you know, we think of China and we want to think of this gigantic population that will export all kinds of bad stuff – Chinese arms race and building islands in the Pacific where they will station their Navy and all of that kind of stuff.

And I think that awful kind of fantasy is predicated on the assumption that everything is going to stay exactly the same as it is now and that societies do not evolve. I think we need to take pause and look because there is a social revolution going on in China and really, my book just kind of got vacuumed into that as one grain of sand that is part of the much larger picture. So that is really something to watch and something to be very excited by. Authoritarianism in politics will not stand. It cannot stand when families start to live and expect kind of a more democratic life. Change does not come from above. It actually comes from the ground up. It is happening. It is starting to happen.

LISA REAGAN: I don’t want to derail us too much with any kind of political grenade, but here in America we have the reality show of an authoritarian-from-hell running for the most powerful position in the world, the United States President. We could spend hours talking about how did that happen.

ROBIN GRILLE: Yeah.

LISA REAGAN: I do actually recommend anybody listening can go to Kindredmedia.org and Suzanne Zeedyk of the University of Scotland has written about that person running for presidency as a symptom of authoritarianism. I think I am just going to leave it there. (See Zeedyk’s work here. Read Grille’s Trump insights here.)

ROBIN GRILLE: Well, but it does, what you’re talking about Lisa, I am glad you brought that up and it’s not separate, it is completely part of what we’re talking about to do with how child-rearing reforms drive in your future. The presidential horror that is happening in your country is not too different from what is happening in Australia, I assure you of that. It is exactly the same thing playing out in slightly different ways and the same in parts of Europe and the UK. I am pretty sure that what’s going on is that we’re living in a moment of backlash. You could easily take Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, not just as individuals who are struggling, but as symbols, for a much larger struggle that is going on around the world at the moment, because what happens when the new grows to a particular size, it starts to become enough of a stretch and the old begins to die and everybody that clings to the old starts to get extremely threatened and will therefore become more organized and more resistant and more violent for a while.

The Trump Phenomenon Started With Childhoods, By Robin Grille

You’re seeing as the world becomes more loving, as people stop giving allegiance to these kinds of delusions of separation – like you identify with a tribe or you identify with a country, or you identify with a race. And by the way there is no such thing as a race. There are no races, genetically speaking, there is no such thing as black or white.

LISA REAGAN: Right, right.

ROBIN GRILLE: It’s really a cognitive condition. I mean, there are cultures and there are cultures and ethnicity too and we should value and we should really appreciate that, but you can’t draw a line around it. It’s completely nonsensical. But somehow, we tend to divide up into these gangs. But that’s dying. It’s dying. If you are the sort of person that is highly identified with a nation or with a race or a religion, boy is that under threat right now because people are loving each other and mixing. The internet and other forces are making these boundaries and identities increasingly meaningless, you know. So in a way, as racism disappears, you are seeing more racism, because there is a backlash from the old. It is getting worse for a while. It is a perilous time, but there is a context for that backlash.

Authoritarian Old Story Death Rattle While New Story Emerges

LISA REAGAN: The context part. That is what I deeply deeply appreciate about Parenting for a Peaceful World. I bring that up all the time and have since the book came out. Please look at this book in order to see the context of what you’re doing. Why are you feeling conflicted perhaps in your parenting choices? Is it because as Joseph Chilton Pearce, the Grandfather of the Conscious Parenting Movement, said, “We have cultural imperatives telling us one thing and our biological imperatives driving us in another direction towards wellness for our children and we end up in this bio-cultural conflict” is what he called it. Your book is the only book that I know of that allows us to take that journey and to come away feeling, I think, very positive about where we are right now if you have enough context.

ROBIN GRILLE: Uhm, yeah. It is important to understand that whenever there is a big leap forward in social evolution, immediately you will see a backlash. Because people will sometimes defend their identity even more than they will defend their biology. People will die for a belief even if that belief is toxic. But if the belief is something you believe in you feel very threatened. I think what is at war right now is two opposite styles of parenting. I don’t want to label the issue, but it is useful to use the Donald Trump versus Bernie Sanders, and I know Bernie Sanders is not a presidential candidate, but he is really representing the new. He is representing a new form of society in every way. Far more than Hillary as you all know. I don’t have to tell you that.

If I see that, they are representing two radically different styles of parenting that they both come from. Imagine the childhood that Donald Trump would have had and imagine the childhood that Bernie Sanders had. Imagine the childhood of the most rabid Donald Trump supporters and how rigid and closed off they are mentally and imagine the childhood of the most devoted and committed Bernie Sanders supporters. One is heavily authoritarian. The other is much more dialectical and democratic. That’s what at stake.

There is a battle of two different styles of society and two different styles of parenting and the reason that battle is really coming to a head right now is that the new has become so large that the old is really afraid and it is sticking to its guns in a very very literal sense of sticking to its guns. There’s going to be some trouble I think for a while.

LISA REAGAN: So in addition to Parenting for a Peaceful World going into China now, you have been on the road for the last year and you have taken your message of the neuro-social evolution as you call it to the UNICEF Baby Friendly Conference in London last year and then you were just in Findhorn in Scotland, which was one of the most spectacular looking conferences I’ve seen, the Healthy Birth Healthy Earth conference, for those of you who don’t know what Findhorn is, I’m just going to let Robin, you can just tell us about both. I am looking for hopeful, positive directions. This nebulous conscious parenting movement that seems to be happening sometimes and other times, I wonder. But if I follow you around, it looks like, yes, there is movement.

ROBIN GRILLE: Yeah. Again, just a very quick correction. The UNICEF Baby Friendly Hospital Conference, Baby Friendly Initiative, it is called. That UNICEF conference was was in Harrogate, which is in the North of England. There were about 750 delegates there from all over the world. That was 2015 in November.

LISA REAGAN: That’s cool.

ROBIN GRILLE: Just now, we got back from Findhorn, as you were saying, which is just the most magnificent and the most dynamic and so well established intentional community. It is quite large. There must be I think hundreds of people living there.

Apart from the fact that it is a magical place environmentally, it is a beautiful environment and little townships around the place in the North of Scotland, it is a fantastic model for living sustainably. They grow their own food organically. They cook the most beautiful stuff. They are so in tune with their natural environment. It is a very very peaceful place. They generate their own electricity. They have wind turbines. They collect their own water and recycle their own water. They share a very small pool of electric cars, fully electric cars. It feels good just being there.

The UNICEF conference addressed the drive to restore breastfeeding and their concern is human health. My concern is human health plus, that it is not too simplistic to say that you can breastfeed the world back to peace, because with enough people being breastfed in a loving way, it irrevocably changes the neurology of the child and primes the child’s body and neurology and biochemistry. It primes the body of that child towards easier access to blissful states of connectedness and loving relationships to both the human and non-human world. There is a chemical pathway that you can track that explains everything that I just said. It is not that breastfeeding is everything, but boy is it a powerful element in the creation of a loving world.

LISA REAGAN: The baby friendly initiative features ten steps as guides for hospitals, for example, in the US, to conform to help with the bonding and the breastfeeding piece, but as you were saying earlier about this being a time of backlash, there were blogs out there by the dozens by mothers saying that your baby friendly hospital is not mother friendly, stop hounding me to bond and breastfeed my baby. The reason they’re saying this in the US is because we don’t have paid parental leave. We don’t. I have read a couple of these and I have felt with them very heartbroken at the idea of what they’re saying is, ” I am not going to breastfeed and bond with my baby and then two weeks from now, drop them off at daycare and go to work a job so that I can put food on the table.” This is a survival question. So the idea of bonding and breastfeeding is almost emotional suicide: “Don’t ask me to do this.”

ROBIN GRILLE: Yeah, that’s right. What it does is it doesn’t make mothers feel guilty, that’s the wrong thing to say, but mothers end up making themselves feel guilty when they’re confronted with the truth of this is necessary for you and your baby and if you don’t get the right support, this will fail you. I do my best to try to urge mothers to stop feeling guilty and start getting angry.

ROBIN GRILLE: The world is doing something wrong to you because if you had the right support and sufficient support, you wouldn’t really need to be pushed into breastfeeding. You would be carried into a very delicious stated of connectedness through that process. Don’t get guilty and don’t blame the messenger. That’s just dumb. Get angry!

LISA REAGAN: Get angry!

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ROBIN GRILLE: That makes more sense. There is a tremendous backlash of guilt and it’s around the world I am seeing exactly the same pattern wherever I travel and so of course, the thing is, this ten step initiative from the World Health Organization and from UNICEF. It is not sufficient and it is not enough. We need more public policy that really supports families. Just because something is not enough, it doesn’t mean that it isn’t absolutely necessary.

The reason why, when you look at the history of this, the reason why the ten step baby friendly hospital initiative was put into place is because there has been an absolute war against breastfeeding from the gigantic and spectacularly profitable drug cartels. I would like to call them, the pharmaceutical companies, that lie through their teeth and will allow all kinds of human dysfunction to happen. They don’t care as long as they can sell more artificial baby formula. That has been a planetary campaign to destroy breastfeeding because breastfeeding is competition. Breastfeeding mothers can do free of charge and it means that they’re not buying a product that is immensely profitable for the shareholders.

When you look at the relentless and international unstopping incredibly aggressive and vicious campaign from artificial formula companies to destroy breastfeeding around the world, no wonder there is so much urgency to bring it back. But I really agree that mothers need more than a ten step process in the hospital. Mothers need support to be able to take their babies with them where they go.

LISA REAGAN: Robin, let me share quickly with the listener, two resources on Kindredmedia.org. One is your UNICEF talk It is over an hour long, by the way. The second piece is, there is a new book out there called Unlatched that covers exactly what you’re talking about here: the history of the war on breastfeeding. A review of that book by Darcia Narvaez is at Kindredmedia.org.

ROBIN GRILLE: Thank you for that. Yeah, the whole story is there. So who are the breastfeeding nazis? The breastfeeding nazis are the people that took it away and sold you the lie in its place. It really horrifies me how that has been done to an entire species, really? So, but it is slowly coming back. Then you asked about Findhorn, did you want me to speak to that a little?

The Global Emergence of New Story – at Findhorn and Elsewhere

LISA REAGAN: Yes. Yeah. Oh gosh, yeah. Findhorn. Tell everybody, it is this beautiful Scottish castle and then it is surrounded by an eco-village and they have this Healthy Birth, Healthy Earth conference there that you attended and spoke at just last month.

ROBIN GRILLE: Yeah, the Findhorn Foundation is this wonderful community and it is so lovely. I’ve known of it since I was about 11 years old. I started reading books about Findhorn. They’ve been around since I think the late 50s and 60s. There have been many books written about them and now it is like an international education facility. There are all things to do with new ways of society and sustainable living, healing practices, etc. It is very vibrant and dynamic. This conference was called Healthy Birth, Healthy Earth, which is in recognition of that. It is somewhat of how we should treat the planet and non-human family and non-human brothers and sisters and I guess I really want to refer to nature as family, you know. It helps me to remember that I’m connected and we’re connected and we’re not here to use the place. We’re here to belong.

LISA REAGAN: Yes.

See Robin Grille at Climate Change and Consciousness: Our Legacy for the Earth!

ROBIN GRILLE: And the way that we treat the earth is deeply deeply affected, deeply influenced by the way that we are born into the earth and the way that mothers and fathers are treated in their mother’s wombs and the way when we are born and those first few magical moments of life outside the womb in which so much imprinting happens and so much bonding becomes possible. There is just an extremely magical natural plan. I think of it as the love potion. You know the old the fairy tale as the love potion, when you drink it, you fall in love with the first person you see, you know that’s archetype.

That is a myth that is allegorical or it is a metaphor for exactly what the design is for the birth of the human child because in natural birth, the flaws of ecstatic hormones are torrential. There is never enough a moment in the human lifespan that there is so much of that flow and the design is there that we look for the mother’s eyes, we connect visually. The naturally born child is quite awake and alert. The design is to fall head over heals in absolute physical love with one unique and irreplaceable specific individual. Attachment is about specific individuals. We connect with this one person and it’s mother. Dad at the beginning comes a very very close second. That’s the beginning. That’s the foundation of emotional intelligence. That deeply influences the way that we grow into connecting or failing to connect with the life force that surrounds us as we grow and really the way that we devastate and exploit this planet with absolute impunity to the point of putting our own lives catastrophically at risk is just a no brainer given the violence under which the majority of people are born.

And that, Lisa… this conference was with obstetricians, midwives, and doulas, and medical anthropologists examining the state of affairs in natural birth how that is going around the world and industrial obstetric birth. There is always a need for obstetrics and it can be lifesaving in extreme circumstances, but it is… that is not what obstetrics is about in the way that it is being used today and I came out of that conference both very thrilled with the people I met and the things that I learned and the love that it is in this international movement to reform childbirth, but I also came away deeply disturbed by how violating regularly childbirth is around the world and very frightened for what this is doing for the collective human consciousness.

LISA REAGAN: Yes, so we just had an uptick in maternal morbidity rates in the US. That was in New York Times this month, big study that came out and showed that. We were already at the bottom of the pack for maternal and infant wellness against all developed countries here in the US. It’s out of control. It’s getting worse. When I look out to see discussions around what can we do, I was so thrilled to see the Healthy Birth Healthy Earth Conference, because I don’t see us creating more medical models to address this. It’s got to be way outside the box with a different paradigm and from a different place.

ROBIN GRILLE: Yeah. Yeah. I cannot exaggerate the violence that it does to families and to the beginning of the human life to hit it with our defenses in industrial obstetrics. I call it industrial because it is a huge amount of business involved money.

LISA REAGAN: Right.

ROBIN GRILLE: And machinery that is used way way way past where it is actually required and I was absolutely gobsmacked to discover how radically unsupported by anything scientific this is. There is no science behind hospital policy to attack the mother’s body with these machines in a way that just really really hits the baby very hard as well as the mother. No wonder we have the kind of postnatal depression rates that we have and it is hurting human consciousness. It is making it more detached and disconnected.

LISA REAGAN: Right from the beginning.

ROBIN GRILLE: Because you effect at a time of huge vulnerability and there is a biological expectation for great blissful bonding and delicious bonding at that very window of opportunity, we’re radically altering the biochemical bias that the baby’s neurology swims in and we are priming the brain of the baby towards dis-associative states and that stays with you.

LISA REAGAN: Yes.

ROBIN GRILLE: That stays with you. Unless it is some great great healing that comes later in life, which is highly possible, but if it doesn’t, we stay disassociated, detached, and there is a whole range. If you look at the Primal Health Database, there are tens of thousands of studies looking at the impact in every area of human wellness.

ROBIN GRILLE: Yes. Absolutely. Michel Odent, MD. I mean, he is not writing this. He just has got a thing that collects peer-reviewed articles from medical and psychiatric journals. I mean the evidence is absolutely in the bucket loads. Absolute A-Z of human dysfunctions psychological and neuropsychological that can last a life of a result of this really atrocious way that we are birthing children in this earth. I mean I am talking about rates of cesarean in some countries in South America that are up to 80%.

LISA REAGAN: Yeah.

ROBIN GRILLE: There is no, I mean, that is just an outrage. There is no excuse for that. 80% cesarean, that is rubbish. I am only just talking that is just the tip of the iceberg. We do have a problem on our hands. Alot of other things are getting better. This is getting worse. So I have to say that I was moved by the conference. I was, you know, profoundly honored to be there and to contribute and I was also very disturbed and I have come away with a sense of great urgency. We’re not going to change politics by voting differently. We need to start from the ground up and the first place to change is how mothers and fathers are treated around pregnancy and birth and how babies are born. That’s even deeper than the whole attachment revolution that is very well understood now.

There has been a taboo when it comes to talking about childbirth. It is time to lift that taboo and to recognize the urgency and to get busy. I will also tell you that in the middle of my despair about this whole issue, I have also been very heartened to discover that there are big moves too. This is a recognizable human rights issue. This is not just… this is no longer kind of just mothers who are activists for natural birth. There are human rights lawyers, obstetricians and midwives and medical anthropologists, so a very broad range of professions, who decided to roll their sleeves up.

This has been made into a human rights question, a human right to be born naturally unless there is a really really clear and incontrovertible need for medical intervention. It is a human right to have your psychological needs thoroughly met at the prenatal and perinatal stage because there is a need for blissful connectedness as we enter into the outside world. That’s the plan. That is the natural plan. Nature does not like to be messed around with as we all know. That stuff comes at a great cost. We don’t mess with that stuff. I have discovered these human rights activists. I shouldn’t say I’ve discovered them. I have come to this very late. I have been told about this recently. They had big big conferences. The last one was in The Hague, Netherlands, and the next one was in India in 2017. I think they’re called Childbirth and Human Rights.

ROBIN GRILLE: Yeah, you do that really well, thank you Lisa. I am glad that you are putting those resources out. As many people as possible need to find those out and we all need to get vocal. This effects everybody. It doesn’t matter even if you don’t have any children and never will and don’t want to, that’s absolutely fine, but it effects everybody because you know, I can say it again until I am blue in the mouth but what we do to children is what they will do to the planet when they grow up.

LISA REAGAN: Yes, that is very close to being a Pam Leo quote, “How we treat the child, the child will treat the earth.”

ROBIN GRILLE: I famously misquoted Pam Leo there. But she put that quote there better than anyone else. But all credit to Pam Leo.

The Post-Joseph Chilton Pearce World: The Lack of Science In Public Policy

LISA REAGAN: But then there is Thomas Verny, who was one of the founders of Birth Psychology, and his quote is, “Womb ecology becomes world ecology.” So he takes it back even further. He takes it to what we know about what’s going on in the womb as the child is being formed. The brain is selecting for how should I live in this world? Is my mother terrified? Do I need to forget about creative thinking and go for the amygdala development? We know that is what is happening now in utero.

There is a wonderful, by the way, In Utero documentary out there, so on one hand, when I talk to you, I feel like there is so much coming forward now, and this is the purpose of Kindred – to try to help everyone have a place to go where they can see what is happening because there is so much across different fields. As you were saying, all of these different professional representing different fields are coming forward to take this message back out in their professions. But this kind of leads me where I wanted to end with you and that is, Joseph Chilton Pearce passed in August 2016 and I did get to see him before he passed and I know we have a wonderful interview with you sitting in rocking chairs talking with Joe.

ROBIN GRILLE: I’ll never forget it. I’ll never forget that.

LISA REAGAN: So Joe’s work began in the 70s and, I didn’t want to be naive or simplistic and say, “how are we doing since then” because the world is changing and is so much more complex, but it is very frustrating today, looking at the gap between science and public policy, so what do you think overall? It seems like a critical time, but…?

ROBIN GRILLE: Yeah, look, I’ve got two thoughts about that question… On the one hand, I think we need to be respectful of the sense that we are living in an ice age moment. So there are no predictions to be made right now. That it’s all going to be okay or that it won’t be. Right now, I would like everybody to not look for a prediction. Don’t let life happen, you happen to life. So let’s turn this into intention rather than prediction.

Everyone has a unique gift to contribute and a unique voice and a unique calling and what will I put into, you know, the drive towards cultural creativism and the neuro-social evolution and a new world. But at the same time, I think there is a lot of reason for great hope because while there is a backlash going on and a backlash would be pretty terrible and I have already spoken about that and we are seeing it politically around the world, not just in the United States.

The things that are growing are in terms of a whole new way of organizing society and relating to the environment. There is so much of that going on. In moments of despair when we think, is it worth it? We really need to go out and look for that stuff, because that is what refuels and re-encourages you to keep doing the reform work that we all need to do. We need to change birthing. We need to change early childhood and we need to really change education and then at the same time change how we make things and how we grow things, our food and stuff, etc. It is happening. It is really really happening on so many levels. You know, in my books and in my talks, and in my articles, etc, I talk about spectacular changes in even Hong Kong is starting to do homeschooling and they are resisting homework, etc. These changes are coming and it is reflected in the way that I am continually finding new and incredibly thrilling things in the world of business and in the world of the manufacturer and the world of growing food. There is a kind of a movement away from the straight line towards the circle. I could give you examples. I do not want to leave it too abstract, so I want to give you some examples.

LISA REAGAN: Sure.

Expanding Human Potential by Supporting Those Who Care For Children

ROBIN GRILLE: Look, if you had ten hours, I could speak about this for eleven hours. The abundance of exciting things, but it is important to know, but it is not like we had one kind of, you know, we don’t have a Nelson Mandela or a Ghandi that will come and save us and it is all busy work. Most of the good things that go on, you won’t know they are there until you go looking for them. So you need to do that so we don’t despair.

One of the things that I am absolutely wrapped in is the work of William McDonough, designer and architect who has been immensely and internationally powerful at re-articulating the absolute core philosophy of how human beings should make things because we are the apes that make things. He said that up until now, we had been using a linear model, which he calls take, make and discard. You take something out of nature which is kind of a violating, it is a theft. You rip it out, like you mine it out. You make a hole or you chop it out or something. Then you make some stuff. You use it and you chuck it. You make a mess. You make a toxic waste dump from it, which is poisonness to the earth.

At every stage, that is a violent destructive process. Now a lot of people think that’s just what humanity is. No it’s not. Living in this linear productive fashion is a symptom.The violence that has been done to us in childhood has become the violence that we do to the environment and we get cognitively trapped in that under the delusion that is the only way – and I promise you that is absolutely rubbish. Here we are with the work of people like William McDonough and many others who have re-articulated the circular economy where you don’t mine the earth anymore, you mine whole things. Now I think about this and it makes me feel quite ecstatic. Everything is in a circle. There is absolutely no technological reason why everything, absolutely everything cannot be 101% recyclable, reusable, upcyclable. There is now an international, it is called a cradle to cradle certification.

If you make a product, it doesn’t matter what it is, a car, a chair, a television, a lawn mower, if you make that product in a way that makes it at least 95% recyclable and if you can prove that you are treating your workers really fairly and equitably, so around the entire circle, everything is sustainable and loving and there is a filter that you must pass through, then you get this international rating of cradle to cradle. I am now sitting on my cradle to cradle certified task chair, an office chair. Made in the United States. It is my favorite thing that I own. I am in love with it. It is intensely comfortable and when it falls apart one day. It hasn’t even started to. I’ve had it for several years. When it falls apart, I can dismantle it in ten minutes and every single item is 100% recyclable. That’s a model for the economy for the whole world.

LISA REAGAN: Yeah, yeah. I know you’re talking about things and products right now, but I always like to point out when we get to that place of moving into materialism that this is based on either, as you say, the linear, take, make, and discard, or the circle, which is a symbol for wisdom, and what sociologists like Paul Ray say is the purpose of those people that you just called on to live intentionally instead of waiting for somebody to predict what is going to happen for them to start living intentionally. This whole wisdom model, I love it. This is wonderful. This is where the quality of our consciousness comes into play.

ROBIN GRILLE: It really does. Yeah. The circle applies to everything. I’m not just talking about the chair I’m sitting on. This is really growing around the world. I don’t know if you’re aware, for instance, but Sweden has run out of garbage. They have a crisis in so far as they’re not producing enough rubbish. Can you believe that?

Heart-to-Heart Parenting: It’s About Heart Pleasure

LISA REAGAN: Two things, I want to wrap up our hour together, but I again, want to leave our reader with resources. Could you talk a little bit about Heart-to-Heart Parenting? Because I think this is a resource for where you want to go, whereas Parenting for a Peaceful World can show you culturally where we’ve been, but you do have a path out and you have created that path. I also want to mention the virtual retreat “Inner Child”. So we have resources for our listeners.

ROBIN GRILLE: Yeah. You guys have got fantastic resources. In my book, the difference between my two books, a lot of people do use Parenting for a Peaceful World as a parenting resource, but it also has a lot of this sociology and psycho-history and you know, it is kind of a social progressive sort of handbook. Teachers use it a lot. School teachers and all kinds of health practitioners as a textbook.

Even though it is not written as a textbook, the language is designed to flow and be easy to read, but it is very heavily referenced to science. The other book, Heart-to-Heart Parenting, is much more conversational and more concerned with just the family relationships. It is much more personal. It is what our children need from inside the womb all the way to primary school age even though some of the communication skills that are shown in the book can apply to, you know, our relationships to children of any age, 17, 25-year-old, your partner. But it also, in looking at early childhood in particular, it also, that book looks very very much at the needs that parents have. You were talking earlier about how it is very hard for mothers to discover that baby’s need breastfeeding if mothers aren’t at the same time being given the kind of support they need.

Heart-to-Heart Parenting doesn’t put the baby first, it puts the whole family first. Feed the parents so that the baby can be fed. The goal of that book as a parenting manual is a more pleasurable life.

LISA REAGAN: So not child or parent centric, but family.

ROBIN GRILLE: Pleasure is kind of the guiding… and by pleasure I don’t mean hedonism. I mean heart pleasure. I am talking about bliss and I’m talking about joy. That’s the guide. I think a deep state of contentment, joy, and even bliss and ecstasy are symptoms of connectedness. As we understand what drives human connectedness in our communication, we can open our hearts to each other. You know, when you start feeling like you are really enjoying the process of parenting, not just trying to get it right, but really really enjoying it, right there is your feedback, your biofeedback that you have found your places of connectedness, that shifts and changes through the different developmental stages of your childhood. Right there, that is what Heart-to-Heart Parenting is about. I want the pursuit of happiness. That is too humble of thing. We need to add an extra amendment to the bill of rights, Lisa.

LISA REAGAN: You cut out just a tad. You cut out just a little bit right there. What about the bill of rights?

ROBIN GRILLE: We need to add a new amendment to the bill of rights, Lisa.

LISA REAGAN: Oh, a new amendment, okay.

ROBIN GRILLE: Because I think the pursuit of happiness is too humble a thing to ask for. It is the… I am thinking about the human right to the ecstatic peak experiences moments of bliss in our life. It is the pursuit of bliss in our life. It is the biological birth right that is designed into every human body. Let’s add that in. It is important and necessary.

LISA REAGAN: Well, I love it. I love bliss and ecstasy a lot better than happiness in the US has been marketed as something you buy. I don’t know that word has a whole lot of meaning that it used to have to it. It is more of an anxiety word. How can you be happy? How can you be happy? Why aren’t you happy?

ROBIN GRILLE: It is co-opted by commercial interests, you know. You will be happy. Happiness comes from property. Never a bigger lie was ever told. Everyone says you can be rich and not happy and still no one listens. That’s not entirely true though. People are starting to listen to that more and more. But yeah, absolutely. The pursuit of blissful connectedness, let’s call it that.

LISA REAGAN: There we go. Well, thank you so much, Robin, for giving us a tour of where you’ve been and where Parenting for a Peaceful World is going. That is all really wonderful news and I can’t wait to talk again so we can see what is happening there with E. Diversity in Hong Kong that’s bringing the book then into China. I want to ask everyone to go to Kindredmedia.org again because we have a whole collection of Robin’s Parenting for a Peaceful World videos and as you can see from his tour here a few years ago, we have lots more in the hopper that will one day make it to the site and yes, that’s a plea for donations that you can also do on the site. So thank you again, Robin.

]]>http://kindredmedia.org/2017/09/parenting-peaceful-world-goes-china-update-robin-grille/feed/0Cannabis, Pregnancy And Breastfeedinghttp://kindredmedia.org/2017/05/cannabis-pregnancy-breastfeeding/
http://kindredmedia.org/2017/05/cannabis-pregnancy-breastfeeding/#respondSat, 27 May 2017 01:44:55 +0000http://kindredmedia.org/?p=20217What is the long medicinal history of cannabis in pregnancy and breastfeeding? What does the science say? Laurel Wilson, a 20 year veteran childbirth educator and lactation consultant, says the real “risk” is not supporting breastfeeding for informed mothers who choose natural medicines. Laurel Wilson, IBCLC, CLE, CCCE, CLD, the author of The Greatest Pregnancy […]

What is the long medicinal history of cannabis in pregnancy and breastfeeding? What does the science say? Laurel Wilson, a 20 year veteran childbirth educator and lactation consultant, says the real “risk” is not supporting breastfeeding for informed mothers who choose natural medicines.

Laurel Wilson, IBCLC, CLE, CCCE, CLD, the author of The Greatest Pregnancy Ever and founder of MotherJourney, shares the history of cannabis use in pregnancy and breastfeeding as well as the known science and the current research. She outlines the issues surrounding mothers who are making a choice to use a more natural substance for health issues. Wilson lives in Colorado where the issues around pregnancy and breastfeeding are being actively explored by informed mothers and physicians.

]]>http://kindredmedia.org/2017/05/cannabis-pregnancy-breastfeeding/feed/0The Conscious Parenting Movement Goes To The UN!http://kindredmedia.org/2017/05/conscious-parenting-movement-goes-un/
http://kindredmedia.org/2017/05/conscious-parenting-movement-goes-un/#respondWed, 10 May 2017 00:52:04 +0000http://kindredmedia.org/?p=20181The Conscious Parenting Movement – based on attachment science, neurobiolgy and brain development and founded organically by multiple pioneers and organizations over 30 years ago as a consciousness-raising movement – arrived at the United Nations this past February in the form of an international alliance of nonprofit and educational organizations under the banner of CEPP, […]

The Conscious Parenting Movement – based on attachment science, neurobiolgy and brain development and founded organically by multiple pioneers and organizations over 30 years ago as a consciousness-raising movement – arrived at the United Nations this past February in the form of an international alliance of nonprofit and educational organizations under the banner of CEPP, Childhood and Early Parenting Principles.

In this interview with Valerie Unite, the founder of CEPPs, the listener learns of the exciting networking and information exchanges currently taking place at the UN, the necessity of helping governments, cities and communities develop effective and cost-saving programs based on conscious parenting principles, and the plan going forward.

A Worldwide Need

The worldwide need for CEPPs is multi-faceted, highlighted by studies of the social and economic impacts in diverse areas such as:

Pre-conception Care and Education – Pre-conception care is the provision of biomedical, behavioural and social health interventions to women and couples before conception occurs. Perinatal deaths are 50% higher among children born to mothers under 20 years of age compared to mothers aged 20–29 years. Read more.

Maternal Mental Health – Perinatal mental health problems are very common, affecting up to 20% of women at some point during the perinatal period. They are of major importance because they have been shown to compromise the healthy emotional, cognitive and even physical development of the child, with serious long-term consequences. These factors are not yet fully acknowledged and adequately integrated into policy making. Read more.

Premature Birth – Each year, some 15 million babies in the world, more than one in 10 births, are born too early. More than one million of those babies die shortly after birth; countless others suffer some type of lifelong physical, neurological, or educational disability. Read more.

Poverty – More than 60% of preterm births occur in Africa and South Asia, but preterm birth is truly a global problem. In the lower-income countries, on average, 12% of babies are born too early compared with 9% in higher-income countries. Within countries, poorer families are at higher risk. Read more.

Building healthier, fairer and more peaceful societies

It may be surprising to find criminologists teaming up with specialists in early childhood development to fight crime and improve levels of safety in society. But at the 2017 Stockholm Symposium on Criminology in June, a key component of the programme will be early intervention, with a focus on mothers and families.

This year Queen Silvia of Sweden will present the prestigious Stockholm Prize in Criminology to Professor Richard E. Tremblay (Canada/France/Ireland) for his work in developing basic science connections between biological, family and social factors in human development. Prof. Tremblay combines this research with rigorous tests of policies that may alter these factors to reduce crime and violence.

Early intervention during pregnancy helps control aggressive behaviour

His studies show that the benefits of nurture merit early intervention programmes, regardless of the uncertainties in the biological part of the story. And his research shows that earlier intervention may produce even better results. “If we support these parents during pregnancy and if we help these women have a better lifestyle during pregnancy, with less stress, it should affect brain development, and these children should be better able to learn how to control their aggressive behaviour,” he says.

The CEPPs framework for implementation of ECD programmes

Valerie Unite, CEPPs founder featured in the interview above, was invited to the symposium to introduce the Childhood and Early Parenting Principles (CEPPs), a policy framework for the implementation of early childhood development programmes. The CEPPs Mother and Child Manifesto is a set of 7 principles that form the basis for a unified multi-sector and multi-stakeholder partnership between government, private sector and civil society organizations.

These principles aim to do for mothers, families and young children what the Women’s Empowerment Principles (WEPs) are doing for women in the workplace. They have the single aim of ensuring that every child grows in a safe and nurturing environment and develops to their full potential.

CEPPs works bottom-up, city-by-city promoting multi-stakeholder networks to accelerate the implementation of the UN Every Woman, Every Child Global Strategy (2016-2030).

This framework incorporates the work of pioneers in the field of pre- and perinatal psychology like Dr. David Chamberlain, Dr.Thomas Verny and Dr. Rupert Linder. Extracts of their work over a period of 30 years will be found in Articles and Papers pages on the CEPPs website.

As Mahatma Gandhi said, “if there is to be peace in the world, we must begin with the children”.

Too many children are not thriving and are just surviving, too many parents and expectant parents need help and support. How can we hope for peace if peace if peace is not engrained during the very early years of a child, and even earlier, in the womb, as a normal and natural state?

We strongly believe that support for early parenting and early child care and education can have a lifelong impact on a child’s physical, emotional and mental health, and that is why we invite you to support our Manifesto, to share it with your friends and colleagues, and together we can do great things to build healthier, fairer and more peaceful societies!

“At the level of the individual, early childhood provides a unique opportunity to address issues that would contribute to transform the culture of war to a culture of peace…

The events that a child experiences early in life, the education that the child receives, and the community activities and social and social mind-set in which a child is immersed, all contribute to values, attitudes, traditions, modes of behaviour, and ways of life develop.”

LISA: I am very excited to be here with you. I need to share a story with our readers, so they understand the relevance of CEPPs and your work. Almost twenty years ago, I sat at a public park with a group of mothers in Virginia – one of the first Families for Conscious Living community groups. We were studying attachment science and neurobiology and brain development as it related to nurturing our babies and trying to figure out how to incorporate these mostly unstated principles. Attachment Parenting International, API, was just coming out at that time as well, but there was very little cultural support at all much less public policy support for what became known as the conscious parenting movement.

And, so the reason I am so excited to talk with you today is that you and your partners have created CEPPs and they are bringing forward the science-based insights of conscious parenting to the U.N., which in our culture is about as top of the pyramid as you can get, and you are working with international organizations there to bring recognition to these principles. So, this is amazing progress in 20 years. (Listen to FCL’s history here, read our historical and archived 10th anniversary newsletter here.)

VALERIE: That is correct, yes. We started last year and I really thought I would gather some major partners of the fields and of the perinatal and prenatal, so we last year when I went to the U.N. in New York it all started there, and we just decided to partner and to propose a framework called the Childhood and Early Parenting Principles as a complementary approach to the existing frameworks. With this framework are seven principles that really form the basis for a unified partnership between governments, private sector, civil organizations, and nonprofit organizations. I think that is what is really, really very interesting and something quite new in fact.

LISA: It is new, and I am very encouraged by the fact that is based on the WEPs model, which I would like for you to talk to us about – but also to talk to us about this blind spot with the Women Empowerment Principles that exists. So tell us first about WEPs and how that was useful in creating CEPPs.

VALERIE: Yes, of course. The WEPs are the Women Empowerment Principles. I came in to contact with this organization because I was part of another NGO at that time, and these Women Empowerment Principles have been defined as a framework to help and support women, but in the workplace in the world, and it is very successful. It has been now more than 10 years that they have focused on women in the workplace. I felt and realized that they were not really taking into consideration the role of mothers – and mothers and children are so important for the future of humanity. So, we decided to create something that was very close to the model of the Women Empowerment Principles and would define our set of principles that would really make a difference in the life of mothers and families and children in the world.

So, CEPPs has been able to define the business case and now we have exactly a business case for the mothers and children. Before that we had the science case, and we have the social case that really allow us to talk to the government and the government agency and say, look this is very, very crucial and important that you really take this public and implement policies so we build a healthier, fairer, more peaceful societies. CEPPs focuses on the child’s critical years from conception to age three, and we now know that during these windows of opportunity the brain develops faster than any other time in life. We really think these critical years are the foundation that shape a child’s future, physical, mental, emotional health with a lifelong impact. And not only for themselves, but for their communities and society. That is why we believe it is so, so important and we are so excited to work on that.

LISA: Oh, there are so many questions and there are so many pieces to talk about. First of all, I would like to say in the United States it is hard to imagine the excitement around attachment and science and brain development that exists in other countries because our culture here is so opposed to supporting mothers and families and, of course, we are at the bottom rankings for maternal and infant health among developed countries. So, it probably is hard to imagine how excited other countries are to meet with you at the platform there at the United Nations and how the hunger is there for this information, for the programs, for educational projects and just the exchange of what are you doing, what is working for you? Can you talk to us a little bit about that?

VALERIE: Yes, of course. I think now it becomes a worldwide awareness that really we need to, to support mothers and mothers-to-be and families. When I said mothers, I do include fathers, so I would say mothers and families and caregivers, and it is also a topic that is now becoming an important topic in the U.S. because it is so obvious that if we really want to have a more peaceful society we have to support the mothers because science and neuroscience tell us that, really the brain…the brain is building, you know, during the pregnancy so if we really want to help our society we have to help mothers so that mothers are able to bring to the world healthy, healthy babies and this is what we talk about now in the whole world, yes and many countries of course are more…are advanced on some policies, some are less advanced, but we learn from each other.

That is why we really want to meet and meet all of these different countries in the world and share the knowledge…the knowledge of best practices is really key to our initiative. And also, I think now we have some…some work where in America they are also able to say how important it is to invest…invest on mental health, for example, and maternal health because if you invest $1 you are able to save $7 to $10 for…in the future.

So this is really now a business case that policy makers are taking seriously, absolutely in the whole world. It is a long work though. It is not going to happen overnight, but…but now we have strong cases to invite our government to implement the policies that are really supporting, and…this case. So we work with policy makers, government, non-government, society stakeholders and professional associations, of course research associations, universities, institutions, absolutely. We want to include social care, early childhood care and development, and you know it is all about that. We are in touch with midwife organizations, nurses, doulas, GPs, obstetrician, gynecologists, pediatricians, mental health professionals. It is really a stakeholder initiative and we cannot afford to work in silos, and even at the U.N. level and at a very high level, the World Health Organization as well as UNICEF and U.N. they now want to work with the civil society of NGO as a multi-partner initiative and multi-sector and multi=stakeholder. We have to work all together on that.

LISA: If you are part of an organization in the United States, can you become a part of CEPPs and work with other organizations internationally on bringing the principles sort of down the chain?

JOIN INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS STUDYING BIRTH PSYCHOLOGY NOW

VALERIE: Yes, yes absolutely you can…you can join our global initiative. We propose a collaborative platform in each country and we have, our partners are already in different countries in the world and our founding partners also can work with organizations in their country like APPPAH, for example in the USA so these organizations can connect with APPPAH and also they would be connected with our network. So on our website you will have all the information on that, but definitely we welcome any professional organization to join and to share their knowledge with us and also one very important thing is that we would like to share this knowledge with developing countries, you know, because we are…most of our partners are living in developed countries but there is a huge need for developing countries to receive some help and support. So, this is where we can bring a lot and this is where I would like to focus this year, to reach out and connect with other organizations in the developed…developing countries, so we are able to bring them the knowledge and the experience that they need. So this is really, really exciting.

LISA: It is very exciting, and I would just like to underline what you are talking about with this ability to network at this top level by providing an example. Kindred has on our board Teresa Graham Brett who is the author of Parenting for Social Change. She is also a Dean of Students at the University of Arizona and practicing attorney, and she was contacted by an organization of parents who had created their own nonprofit in South Africa a few years ago. You can read these stories on Kindred, by the way, at kindredmedia.org But they have been working together for a number of years to bring to South Africa through the nonprofit structure of Kindred. You know, this is a piece that became quite an eye opener when we started structuring for ourselves these organizational containers that were necessary in order to have some of these exchanges happen in this legitimate and supportive way.

I have watched as Teresa has worked with APEA, which is the Alliance for Parent Education in Africa and it has been…and I know you have been introduced to them, but I think about how much easier it would have been if there had been some larger container for international organizations to go to right away to get the materials that they need, and this…the Parent Liberation Alliance is Kindred’s arm for doing this, but it…it is just something that came from the need of the conscious parenting movement – which is just this organic consciousness raising phenomenon that has been going on for decades now. And so there were people showing up to fill these little vacuums, but to have this top level effective global initiative and roundtable that people can more easily find materials…and this is just…it is just very exciting, Valerie. I am so grateful for all of your work.

VALERIE: Yes, this is really something very, very important that is very dear to my heart. We really want to and we need to connect with this country and Africa and also in Asia, I am amazed by the work there is to do in Asia also and in South Africa…I visit South Africa regularly and I will be in touch with more organizations and also South America, this is a very, very important place to be to help. I know there are some programs already in some countries like Chile and Brazil, but clearly we need to…we need to reach the top level, you know the government, and invite them to clearly make a strong, you know, statement of support and…so that they can implement the policy that we are proposing, and we now have two movements.

We have a top down movement from the U.N., UNICEF, the World Health Organization, but they need the civil society and they need NGOs to really…from the grassroots level to help them in implementing, so I was very, very interested to realize that they need us more than we think in fact, so this is where we have a huge role to play and we can bring a lot there. And our contribution will be absolutely…absolutely crucial. This is something that I learned and I am really convinced of that.

LISA: Wow, okay…

VALERIE: So really want to try to mobilize, you know, organizations and individuals with this objective of building a multisector, multi stakeholder network also at the city, if possible city and county levels, city and region levels. We also have a program we are working on this year called the CEPPs friendly cities. It is a program in order to promote the creation of city level networks, you know, of actors in the field of health, education, social service involved in maternal…physical and mental health and early childhood development so that we can promote the sharing of best policy.

Cities will share between themselves, you know, best practices between these networks. So this is something that we are working on and we are very happy with that…so that some cities will be able…(inaudible) program will be able to help other cities in other countries to…to implement these roadmaps. We have a roadmap; we have a 10-step roadmap that can help the implementation, so we are very, very busy with that but so, so happy and we will regularly also attend the United Nations meetings so that we can share, you know, this experience and also meet people like, you know, organizations involved in the same field we can meet and share our experiences, so this is very, very interesting.

It is so fulfilling to do that. The time is now, you know. There is a grand convergence and we all realize that this is absolutely crucial. I mean, children are really the future of humanity and the mothers play the crucial role, and they should be recognized for this role. So this is how we think and we hope CEPPs can make a difference in the lives of women, young children, and we want to scale up the implementation of the SDG, the Sustainable Development Goals defined by the United Nations. Our program is following these seven principles, SDG, and so, yeah we have a great roadmap from this top down intuitive by the U.N. and we try to bring in our contribution, yeah absolutely.

LISA: So where do people go to find CEPPs and what will they find on your website. You have kind of told us a little bit but where can they go?

VALERIE: Yeah, so they can go to our website cepprinciples.org They will find on the homepage they will find different topics and the manifesto as well as our flyer and 10-steps and roadmap they will find in the CEPPs toolkit, CEPPs implementation toolkit. They will have some flyers and different languages and they have the manifesto there, the presentation also and our CEPPs agenda, so it is all there. We also have a very good resources with our CEPPs directory and articles and papers about prenatal, perinatal, maternal mental health also, bonding attachment, breastfeeding. And we really cover all of those very important topics, and we explain what our four pillars are. You know, we have four pillars which are…understand and share the knowledge worldwide, engage with policy makers at the highest level, and then we wish to empower communities to engage with policy makers and then realize the vision for a fairer society.

So all of that is contained in our toolkit and resources page, so yes we are really happy if people could join and also we invite them to come to our website. We created a café, a café which is like a meeting place where people can join, ask questions, post comments, and so that is also what we would like to do. We are also building a forum discussion whereby people would come and share and ask questions and we are happy to respond. So, that is also something on our website. We also have a Facebook page. You will have the CEPPs Facebook page, and we post regularly and you can of course contact us, ask any question that you have and we are happy to respond. Absolutely…there is a lot to discuss of course.

LISA: From a little park in Virginia to the grassroots consciousness-raising movement to the UN. Before our recorded call, we talked about the networking that has happened at the U.N. with other international organizations and that piece of it is always very exciting to me. I still maintain that it is a little hard to see the conscious parenting movement in the United States but it is there, and you certainly can go to kindredmedia.org and read all about it and see our partners…our pioneering partners that have been with us for about 20 years now, including APPPAH. APPPAH is predating all of us I think at about 32 years, the Association for Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Health who presented with you in February at the U.N., right?

VALERIE: Yes, absolutely. They are a founding partner of our…of our work, and they have done a huge contribution to the work, and yes they were with us at the United Nations of February at the Commission for Social Development and I think and I hope they will be there next year. We are going to start working on that as well. Absolutely, it is all about networking and sharing the knowledge worldwide and it is really…we really feel it is the big momentum at the moment. All of the organizations feel the need to unite, you know, together and have the same common framework and the common unifying approach. That is really what we feel we need because if we have that we will be much more powerful when we talk to our governments, and so there is a need for that.

Absolutely, and so there is a lot of…a lot of passionate people involved in many areas of the prenatal and maternal health and perinatal. We all want the same thing, we just have to get organized, get together and every organization brings so much. We now have more than 30 organizations in our supporters and partners, more than 30 throughout the world and I am going to meet more in Asia and Africa so this is really, really exciting and I do hope America will join us and, you know, we will…it will happen, it will happen. I am sure it will happen with many organizations in America. We have…we have a few already among our supporters. It takes time of course. These things do not happen overnight, but we just have to start the movement and keep going and keep going and bring more evidence to the world. This is very, very, exciting and important. We really…I think…I feel when we meet at the U.N. and other international conferences we have the same goal. We want to build, you know, a healthier more peaceful society. We want peace and mothers play a huge role, and crucial role in that. So, yeah and I thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to be with you today because there is so much to do, so much to do.

LISA: Thank you, so tell me one more time what is the website.

VALERIE: Yes, the website address is cepprinciples.org

LISA: Thank you, Valerie.

VALERIE: Thank you, thank you, Lisa. Thank you, Lisa. Yes, and I hope we can talk again any time and I am happy to respond to any, any question you would have or inquiries from your members.

LISA: Right, we look forward to sharing your story on Kindred as you go along.

VALERIE: Well, thank you so much for the wonderful work you are doing, Lisa. This is really, this is really great.

]]>http://kindredmedia.org/2017/05/conscious-parenting-movement-goes-un/feed/0Connection Parenting: A Lost – Now Found – Interview With Pam Leohttp://kindredmedia.org/2017/03/connection-parenting-lost-now-found-interview-pam-leo/
http://kindredmedia.org/2017/03/connection-parenting-lost-now-found-interview-pam-leo/#respondThu, 02 Mar 2017 15:52:05 +0000http://kindredmedia.org/?p=19938This free, 55 minute download of, An introduction to Connection Parenting, by Pam Leo, is given to all parents who want to learn more about how to create a stronger connection with their children. After listening to what Pam shares, if you can, and if wish to, please donate whatever you can, to her new […]

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This free, 55 minute download of, An introduction to Connection Parenting, by Pam Leo, is given to all parents who want to learn more about how to create a stronger connection with their children. After listening to what Pam shares, if you can, and if wish to, please donate whatever you can, to her new nonprofit initiative, The Book Fairy Pantry Project.

Please go to BookFairyPantryProject.com to learn about the project and make a donation if it inspires you to help make sure ALL parents have books to read to their children, so all children can learn to read. Thank you.

You can also subscribe to the BFPP’s newsletter to catch up with Pam on her travels presenting lectures on Books, Babies and Bonding, as well as read her work on Connection Parenting, poetry on BFPP, and more at: kindredmedia.org/author/pam-leo/

CONNECTION PARENTING: THE INTERVIEW

CARMINE LEO: Hello everybody and welcome. We are sitting here today with Pam Leo, who is a parenting educator and is the creator of a body of ideas called Connection Parenting. I would like to start, Pam, with the first question here. How did the ideas around Connection Parenting come to be

PAM LEO: When I had my first child, I began to realize how little I knew about being a parent and I just wanted to learn everything that I could about how to nurture this child so that she could grow up and have the best life possible. A question kept running through my mind, I wondered, why is we are all born a tiny innocent little being and some people grow up to be a Gandhi and other people grow up to be a Hitler? What happens from infancy to adulthood that makes that difference?

So I just began an independent study and started reading, reading everything I could find in child development, psychology, all of the self help books, which led to reading books about psychology, how did parents parent in other cultures, which led to reading books on anthropology and how did we evolve as a species and its been an ongoing process. So it started with my own child. I then became a family childcare provider so that I could be at home with my own children. I had a second child and I just continued to read everything that I could find that would give me more information about that and the more I read and the more I spent time with children, it was kind of like having a living laboratory because I would read at night and on the weekend and then I got to be with these children day after day and could really see for the things I was reading, did that show up to be true or not true?

It just began to evolve that I started sharing the information I was gathering with my daycare parents, with other childcare providers, and I began to realize that with every book that I read that everyone had a piece of the puzzle. I just started putting these puzzle pieces together. In 1989, I put together a series called, “Meeting the Needs of Children”, which addressed meeting children’s emotional needs. The more I taught the class, the more I learned from other parents and that’s been an ongoing process for 16 years now, and I am embarrassed to say, that I was teaching that class for a long time – about meeting the needs of children – without teaching parents why we need to meet the emotional needs of children. It was when I read Joseph Chilton Pearce’s book, Magical Child, that I really made the connection about connection, about how vitality important that parent-child bond is and that the reason we meet their emotional needs is that it is through meeting their emotional needs that we strengthen that bond.

PAM LEO: The core idea is that we can parent children through connection instead of coercion. The model of parenting that most of us grew up with was either authoritarian parenting, which is based on the child’s fear of the parent or losing the parent’s love, or it was permissive parenting, which is based on the parent’s fear of losing the child’s love. Connection Parenting is not based on fear. It is based on love. It is based on that connection that we have with the child being our most effective tool in parenting that child. When parents come to my workshops, what they most frequently tell me that they have come there for is to get new parenting tools. The most important parenting tool that we have is our bond with that child.

That my experience of being with them is that when their needs are met and nothing is hurting them, they are delightful to be with. When they are not being delightful to be with, their behavior is telling us something. Children, even if they have language, don’t always have the language to tell us what hurts or what they need and so they act it out with their behavior. They communicate through their behavior, thus, acting out behavior in an attempt to get those needs met, to communicate to us what they need so that we can help them get that need met. That if we can see behavior as a form of communication to us, then we can respond to the need being communicated instead of just react to the behavior. That’s the basic premise.

CARMINE LEO: So what’s the first class (also related to book chapters) about?

PAM LEO: The first session is “Our Parenting Inheritance.” In that session, we look at where did we learn to be parents? Most of us did not get to take Parenting 101. What I’ve learned from all of these years of working with parents is that parents either unconsciously parent their children exactly the way they were parented or they often consciously tried to parent exactly the opposite from the way that they were parented. But that either way, we are influenced by how we were parented.

So, in that class, we look at, we actually take an inventory of the things that we learned from our parents that we want to keep and we want to pass onto our children and things that we had models of and that we learned that we, now with the information that we have, would like to do in a different way. So in that first class, parents actually set up their parenting goals. What do they want for their children? What do they not want to have happen for their children? Then we look at their experience and what parenting strengths they have based on that experience and what parenting challenges they will have based on that experience. That becomes their road map, if you will, to use the rest of the course to meet their goals of parenting their children.

CARMINE LEO: So that sets up the good, the bad, and the ugly, so to speak?

PAM LEO: Well, it just lets us be, instead of it being unconscious, it brings it up into our consciousness, which things we are doing that we really want to be doing and which things we are doing because that’s what our model was. One of the things that we know is that we are all like tape recorders. It’s as if the day we were born, someone hit record and every word we ever heard was permanently recorded and then when we become adults, those recordings play when we are interacting with our children. So to just not have our tapes playing unconsciously, to consciously and intentionally be with our children in a way that supports them in getting their needs met.

CARMINE LEO: Okay, so what’s the second class then?

PAM LEO: The second class is called, “Giving Children the Same Respect that we Expect.”

CARMINE LEO: Ah, there’s a tough trick, huh.

PAM LEO: Well, based on the fact that children learn by their models, everything children learn, in fact 95% of everything children learn, they learn by what is modeled for them and one of the most common complaints I hear from adults is that children these days don’t treat anyone or anything with respect. How can they learn respect unless they see respect modeled and they experience respect? Because anytime an adult is disrespectful to a child, what they’re modeling for them is how to be disrespectful.

So, we just look, in that class, we look at all of the ways that children are not treated with respect? How they are in many ways treated as second class citizens and how we can treat them with respect. So the guideline that I give is for parents to ask themselves, would I say that to my good friend? Would I use those words? Would I use that tone of voice? If the answer is no, then we are modeling disrespect and we are treating the child with disrespect.

If we’re going to maintain a strong connection with a child, respect has to be the foundation of that connection. If we want to teach them to treat other people the way they would want to be treated, then we have to model treating them that way. So we cover some of the examples because most of the disrespect that children receive is not even intentional from adults, it’s just our recordings running of the disrespect that we received. So we look at simple things, like how we teach children manners, that adults will often prompt them and say, “What do you say? What’s the magic word?” which is embarrassing to children.

We can teach those things to children simply by modeling them. Simply by saying that to children and saying it to each other, rather than prompting them. It’s hard for parents to believe that modeling will effectively teach that. We feel embarrassed if our children don’t say thank you to other people because we feel like they’re going to think we didn’t teach them to have manners. We can just thank the person ourselves so that we get an opportunity to model that again for children and be respectful to them about how they learn those things.

Another example is how we teach children to share. The way most people teach children to share is they force them to share. That’s not being respectful of children to tell them what they can or cannot do with their own things. One of the things that is important to know about children is that they are completely literal. So if they don’t see us sharing toys, even though we may share many other things with them, they don’t get it that they need to share their toys. So we get our own toy box and have our own toys that we can share with children and share with children who are guests in our home so that we have the opportunity to model that. Because we also model not sharing, you know, we tell children, “This is mine. You may not use it.”

CARMINE LEO: “Keep away from my stereo. Don’t touch that.” Yeah…

PAM LEO: So when we model not sharing, children understand, oh, ownership means I get to control this. I get to say who can use it and who cannot use it and so then when they try to do that with their own things, they meet with the resistance of being told that they have to share their things. We can teach them to share by modeling and also by respecting their right to decide about their things and not forcing them to share.

CARMINE LEO: That’s pretty impressive. That sounds like a hard thing to do, especially if we ourselves were not respected growing up.

PAM LEO: Absolutely. We also talk about not talking about children in front of them as if they were not there. Children experience that all of the time and we would never do that to each other as adults. We would not talk about our good friend while the other friend was standing there as if they were not there. You know, that starts when they’re infants and they can’t speak for themselves, and it’s appropriate to do that, but then we forget to stop doing that and to include them in the conversation and be respectful in that way.

CARMINE LEO: Yeah.

PAM LEO: Because when we are disrespectful to children, when we use coercion to get them to do the things we want them to do, we are modeling using coercion.

CARMINE LEO: Yes.

PAM LEO: It’s one of the huge issues with bullying right now. Bullying in the schools has become a major issue and one of the things that I feel is being overlooked is that where children are learning that is how they are treated. Many parents have been taught to count at their children. To say, “1, 2, 3…” and the child knows, whatever they’ve been told, there’s going to be some consequence if the parent reaches 3 and they have not done what the parent has told, that translates into a child saying to another child, “Do what I say to do or I’m going to hurt you in some way.”

CARMINE LEO: Yes.

PAM LEO: So if we want to stop bullying, we have to stop bullying children.

CARMINE LEO: So what’s the class after respect?

PAM LEO: “Healing the Feeling Child”. Healing the feeling child is about teaching parents the way that children and all people heal from the emotional hurts that happen to us, as much as we try to protect children from harm, we cannot protect them from the daily emotional hurts that are part of living, disappointment, frustration, loss, anger, all of those emotions that parents find so challenging to respond to with their children and how to be with children in a way that allows them to process those emotions and heal those emotional hurts and move forward. When we get stuck in emotional hurts, it’s very hard for children to move forward in their behavior.

Doing this with children strengthens that connection and that bond. One of the strongest ways that we can connect with children is through empathy to let them know that we hear what they’re feeling, they understand what they’re feeling, that what they’re feeling is okay with us and that we’re willing to listen to that and to learn that it’s not our job as parents to stop children from crying. We cannot heal their emotional hurts for them, but we can support them in healing their emotional hurts, by being a safe container to hear those hurts, rather than thwarting their healing by shutting down that process.

CARMINE LEO: So what I am hearing here, is a completely different attitude and view. What does one do about tantrums?

PAM LEO: Tantrums. We don’t do anything about tantrums…

CARMINE LEO: Uh-oh.

PAM LEO: Except create a safe place for them to empty out. All a tantrum is, is spillover. A tantrum is never about the incident or the hurt that we did see. When children don’t feel safe enough to release their hurts, they store them up inside. It’s as if they have a little cup inside where any hurt that happens and they don’t release that hurt when it happens by crying or raging or whatever they need to do to release those painful feelings, they store them inside, but children have a limited capacity to store those hurts. When that cup gets filled, one more little hurt will happen, which is the last straw of the last straw, that spills the cup over and it just all comes pouring out.

CARMINE LEO: There’s a trigger there. Okay.

PAM LEO: It’s a trigger. What children need from us when that is happening to them is just to keep them safe. Don’t let them hurt themselves or anyone else and just let it empty out, empty out, empty out. When the tantrum is over, I am sure most parents have had the experience of what I call the rainbow after the storm, that the child is happy and content and relaxed and loving, as if it had never happened. My experience of children is that when nothing is hurting them, that is how they are. So the bright side to tantrums even though there is not much we can do to prevent them, is that it’s a process they need to go through to empty out and get back to that loving, clear space.

CARMINE LEO: Although I don’t remember myself, I imagine it must be pretty frustrating to be a little kid. You can’t turn the door knob, you can’t tie your shoe. You can’t reach the counter. All of these things that just don’t work well. I can imagine that building up over time.

PAM LEO: It does and very often children are in positions where they don’t have any control over their life. They don’t get a choice, rather they go to childcare or to school or if mom or dad have to go to work, so it’s very easy for little hurts and frustrations to build up. It also depends a lot on the temperament of the child. Some children are far more sensitive than others and so they get a lot more hurt. So their cup fills up a lot more quickly and they just need to heal it by emptying it out.

CARMINE LEO: So, tell us a little about class number four.

PAM LEO: Class number four is called, “The Gift of High Self Esteem.” I always tell parents that I see that class as both the most exciting and also one of the scariest classes because children do not come into the world with any level of self esteem. If they don’t come in with it, then it has to come from their environment and their early environment is their parents, it is their family. They build their sense of self esteem out of the messages they get from that environment.

They know if they are welcome and wanted, or if they feel that they’re a bother. However we interact with children from day one, from when they’re born by how we meet their needs, by how we hold them, by how we talk to them, they begin to build a picture of who they are. One of the writings that was most influential to me in putting together that session was in John Holt’s book, instead of education, he compares human beings to bonsai trees.

CARMINE LEO: Ahh.

PAM LEO: He says the same seedling that you bonsai by clipping the roots and wiring the branches and depriving it of the things that it needs becomes a twisted dwarfed miniature of what was in that seedling. That if that seedling were undamaged and given all of the things it needs, the potential within that seedling would be that it would grow to be tall and straight and he says the same things can happen to human beings. That when we are damaged and not given the things that we need that we end up being dwarfed miniatures of the potential that we were born with. So it really lets us know how much opportunity we have to provide children with the things that they need, especially their bond with another human being, to realize as much as their human potential as possible.

So we look at how do we do that? How do we give children those messages that will allow them to have that and we make a distinction between self esteem and self worth. Self esteem is really much more about how we think others view us. Are we capable? Are we competent? Do we have something valuable to contribute? Where children get a sense of that is from being able to do things, from becoming competent.

There was a time in our culture when children, having many children was considered an asset to a family if they had many children because then there would be enough people so the work that needed to get done so the family could survive would be there for the family. That’s no longer true in our culture. Children are not considered assets, they are considered liabilities because they effect the parent’s ability to be in the workforce and parents don’t need their children’s contribution anymore. Most parents could get along just fine without their children’s contribution. So what once naturally existed because children helped in the garden and helped in the barn, and brought in the wood, now has to be intentionally provided for children. We have to find ways to make their contributions valuable. What happens for children is similar to a Catch-22 that adults have and that we can’t get a job if we don’t have any experience, but we can’t get any experience if no one will give us a job.

Children don’t know how to do things because we don’t let them and we don’t let them, because they don’t know how to do things. So we have to have a willingness to give up perfect and allow children to help us. Now, the jobs that most of us have now, children can’t come along and help us, but most of the things that we do around the home, children can be some part of. From very early on, children want to do things for themselves and for others. A very young baby that’s being fed with a spoon, will say, “Me do it.” They’ll reach for the spoon. They want to do it themselves.

So we just find ways to let children help us with everything we do because the two things that children want most, they want to be with us, and they want to do what we do. So the way that we build high self esteem in children is to give them as many opportunities to become capable and competent as we can. One of the things that parents realize that children don’t have the jobs and responsibilities that they used to, so they try to replace that with chores. Most people have a pretty negative association with the chores they had to do when they grew up. The reason that children have a negative association with chores is that it’s usually something they are expected to go off and do by themselves. Because they want to be with us and do what we do, we need to include children in our work instead of sending them off to do work by themselves.

The most magical word I know of with children is “let’s”, you know, “Let’s bring in the wood,” or “Let’s brush our teeth,” or “Let’s do the dishes.” As long as they can do it with us, then they are usually happy to do it. Doing that with us does increase our connection. So then self worth is really more about how we view ourselves, what we believe we deserve. It’s not as much about how other people see us and where our sense of self worth comes from is how we’re treated. How much time people spend with us. Children watch us all the time and they see what we do and they see what we love. If we play golf, or if we knit, or if we watch television. They see that’s what we love because that’s where we spend our time.

So if we don’t spend our time with them, then what they conclude is they’re not a high priority. So they need that time with us. Now that so many parents are working so much, the term quality time has really become a part of our culture, but it’s used in a way that somehow quality time can make up for the lack of quantity of time that we spend with children. It can’t. Children need that connection with us every single day. They need it as much as they need food. So we can’t say to a child, well, we don’t have time to eat today, but we will eat all day on Saturday. It just doesn’t work that way.

CARMINE LEO: Right.

PAM LEO: They need that connection every day. So we talk about setting up special time to be one on one with a child every single day and keep that connection going and then having other special dates so that we keep the connection. Because if you’re the first child, once the other children are born, you never have that one on one time with your parents again and if you were not the first child, you never have it unless parents set up their life intentionally to include that kind of time. So one of the really important aspects of connection parenting is that it is proactive rather than reactive. What we focus on, rather than how to discipline children when their sense of disconnection results in uncooperative and unacceptable behavior, is how do we maintain the connection to keep it strong enough so that they don’t have to resort to those behaviors to get their needs met.

CARMINE LEO: So Pam, tell us about the next class.

PAM LEO: Um, after self esteem is “Communication that Builds Relationship.” In that workshop, we look at how we communicate with children. One of the ways that adults communicate with children often is by telling them what we don’t want them to do. Children hear “don’t” many many times a day and one of the disconnecting things about “don’t” is that it always feels like a criticism. So after doing all of the work, we’ve talked about building up their self esteem and their self worth, it’s not really helpful to then tear it down again by the way that we communicate with them. So we look at how do we communicate with children to let them know what we do want them to do. And “don’t” is a very very challenging habit to break.

Most parents come back the next week, and say, “If I can’t say don’t, I can’t talk”, because we are so accustomed to telling children what we don’t want them to do. It takes a while to think about what do I want them to do? So I ask parents, you know, what are some typical “don’t”s that you would say in a course of a day? “Don’t hit your brother. Don’t eat the cat food. Don’t jump on the bed.” We have to go through that process of thinking about what we do want them to do. Whatever we focus on is what they’re going to hearing.

So if we end up repeating ourselves again and again, what they are recording, because they are recording just like we were, is all of the things we don’t want them to do. Another communication idea that we work with is how we talk to them about what they do. It’s long been told to parents that children need praise. Most of us grew up hearing, “Good girl” and “Good boy” whenever we did something that pleased our parents and the research shows that praising children doesn’t accomplish for them what we’re really trying to accomplish when we do that. What it accomplishes is having children grow up thinking they need to please other people.

CARMINE LEO: Ah.

PAM LEO: And when children grow up feeling they need to please other people all of the time, when they become adolescents, then what their friends think becomes more important to them then what they think. So our goal is really to have children feel pleased with themselves and we accomplish that much more readily by appreciation, by appreciating them, by description, describing what they’ve done that’s an accomplishment and that’s a really difficult one to change, because we have so many recordings of saying “Good girl” and “Good boy”, it is in a way like learning a new language. Learning a way to communicate with children that allows them to feel pleased. So instead of saying “Good boy”, when they make it to the potty on time, learning to say, “You did it!” So then the focus is they’re pleased with themselves that they accomplished something, not that we’re pleased with them for doing what we wanted to.

CARMINE LEO: Yes.

PAM LEO: We learn about how literal children are with language. You know, very many parents follow everything that they say to a child by “Okay, okay, okay.” Children hear that literally, as if we are offering a choice. Is this okay with you? Usually we are not when we do that. Just eliminating that confusing statement of asking chidren if it’s okay. We learn about giving transition phrases. About saying, “It’s time to clean up” or “As soon as we put our coat on, we can go outside.” Those kinds of phrases elicit cooperation from children rather than resistance because they aren’t coercive. We’re including ourselves in that process. Most of all, the changes in communication are are the changes from coercion to connection.

Rather than saying, “We are not going outside until you pick up your toys.” You know, that’s through coercion. You’re using a threat to get children to do what we want and threats under mind our bond and our connection with children. We don’t create a strong bond through coercion. We just teach children how to use that on other people. When we develop a strong connection with them, they’re invested in keeping that connection. They have something to lose if they aren’t thinking about our needs as well and what it takes for all of us to get what we need, so it continues to be about building the connection about how we spend time with them, through how we talk with them. Every single step of the way, we focus on increasing that connection.

The goals that the parents set out in the first class, we get out at every class and they get to look at them and see how would doing it this way serve you in your goal of creating a stronger connection with your child, so that it’s very individual to each family.

CARMINE LEO: Wow, that just seems like such an enormous set of tasks.

PAM LEO: Well, it is, but parenting is work. I’ve learned that it takes the same amount of time and attention to meet children’s needs as it does to deal with the behaviors that result from their unmet needs.

CARMINE LEO: Yeah.

PAM LEO: We are either going to do it when they’re younger and build that connection, or we’re going to end up doing it in response to the behaviors that will result because of the lack of connection. Either way, we are going to do the work.

CARMINE LEO: So what comes after communication?

PAM LEO: “Discipline through Decoding Behavior”.

CARMINE LEO: The D-word.

PAM LEO: The D-word. I knew that when I was putting together the series that most parents would probably not attend a parenting series that didn’t address discipline. It’s really, I call it proactive discipline, because it’s about meeting needs. It’s not about controlling children’s behavior. Because, again, my experience is that when their needs are met, we don’t need to control their behavior. They don’t need to use their behavior to communicate their unmet needs to us.

So that class is really where everything finally starts to come together. I ask parents to make a list of all of the behaviors that children do that really push their buttons. We learn how to decode those behaviors. In the process of trying to move from coercion parenting, which is the model most of us have to connection parenting, our buttons are going to get pushed. It is inevitable. I figured out a way to get back on track when our buttons get pushed, because I experience this as well and I teach it. I call it the 3 Rs of connection parenting. The 3 Rs are rewind, repair, and replay. So as soon as we realize that we’ve done something that’s created a disconnect, we have to go back and acknowledge that. So an example would be, “The way that I said that to you wasn’t very kind” or “It wasn’t very respectful.” I apologize for that. Will you forgive me?

So that’s the repair. The replay is to do it the way we consciously and intentionally would like to do that. We may find ourselves doing that many times while we’re in that process of moving from coercion to connection. The double benefit of doing that is that we’re modeling that for children. They can see that sometimes they are going to speak or behave in a way that’s hurtful and that they can rewind and they can go back and say, that wasn’t very kind of me and I’m sorry. Then they can do it a different way. We can replay the scene in the conscious intentional way that we would like to do that.

One of the ways that we know that we’ve created a disconnect with a child is, well, actually there are three ways and they will manifest either one of them or all three of them. That is, they won’t look at us, they won’t make eye contact, they won’t talk to us, and they won’t accept our touch. If a child is doing any of those three things, we know that we’ve said or done something hurtful that has created a disconnect. If we’re not being respectful to children and meeting their needs, we’re hurting them. They let us know that by their behavior. So if we’ve created a disconnect with a child, we’ve lost all of our power. It’s just like when you unplug a lamp, there is no more power there.

CARMINE LEO: Oh yeah.

PAM LEO: So in order to get back into the relationship and in order to reconnect, that’s when we go back and rewind and repair it and replay it and do it over again. The more often we do that, the more it will become as second nature to us as the way our recordings have it.

CARMINE LEO: So what comes after behavior?

PAM LEO: Actually, the series was a 6 week session for a long time and the feedback that I was getting from parents is, “This is too hard. I can’t do this. This is raising the bar too high.” I thought, well why can’t we do it? What I realized is that parenting never used to be and was never intended to be a one or two person job. It does take a village to raise a child or at least an extended family.

One of the most damaging things that has happened for families today has been the disappearance of the extended family. That parents are trying to do it themselves. That two working parents or a single working parent is trying to meet all of the emotional needs of all of their children and it’s not possible to do for one or two people. We need more people than that because children’s needs are best met by parents whose needs are met. In order for parents to get their own needs met, they need a support system. They can’t work all of the time and be with their children 24/7 and never get an opportunity to refill their own cup. So in the class, we work on how do we increase our support network? How do we find support for our children?

The example that I love to use is that when we travel by plane and the flight attendant is demonstrating the oxygen equipment, they always say, “If you are traveling with a young child, put on your own oxygen mask first.” That so illustrates how we cannot fill children’s cups, their love cups, if our own needs are screaming at us so loudly that we cannot hear what children need. So we need to create family of choice. If we don’t have biological family who is around and part of our life, then we need to bring other people and we need to create relationships with other people so that our children can have relationships with other people and to have bonds with other people in their life so that everyone can get what they need.

One of the most serious things that’s happening for children in the way that we live today is that they’re spending so many hours with people that they don’t have a bond with.

CARMINE LEO: Yeah.

PAM LEO: Very often, people in my classes will say that their friends say, “Why are you taking a parenting class?” You know, “Why do we need a parenting class? Our parents didn’t ever do parenting classes.” What’s happened is that the bond that children need used to occur naturally by how we lived, even less than 100 years ago, babies were born at home, they were breastfed. They spent their early years at home with their family and the bond just occurred naturally. No one had to think about the bond and we don’t live that way anymore.

Today, most babies are born in the hospital. Most babies are not breastfed and many many babies and young children spend a large part of their day with unrelated others that they do not have a bond with. So, today, we do have to pay attention to the bond. We do have to pay attention to protecting the parent-child bond and to making sure that children get opportunities to bond with the others who care for them. Others caring for our children is not a new thing. Parents have always worked. The difference is that the people who cared for their children while they worked were people that they had a bond with. It was the people in their village. It was the people in their extended family. Childcare has become the extended family by default. If parents have to work and there is no family member to care for their child, they have to turn to professional childcare.

Parents are really pulled in two different directions. They have to work in order to provide for their children’s physical needs just so that they can survive and they need to be with their children to meet their psychological and emotional needs so that they can thrive. So connection parenting is a way for parents to do both. It’s a challenge to do both. It’s certainly easier to create that bond with children if at least one of the parents can be home with them or if parents can divide that up, but it is possible if we’re conscious of it, if we’re conscious that bond needs to be kept strong all of the time, no matter what circumstance we are in, we can find creative ways to go have lunch with the child at daycare or to do special dates with them and make sure that we are connecting with them everyday, that we do special time everyday, so that we can make that shift from parenting through coercion and forcing children to do the things that we want them to do to doing it through connection.

Because coercion only works until they’re as big as we are. You know, sending them to time out is not going to work when they’re a teenager. So by the time they’re teenagers, we need to have something much stronger in place than coercion and the bond and the connection that we have with them is what is stronger than that and we need to start building that as early as we can. A lot of the parents who come to my workshops didn’t have this information on strong bonding when their children were young and so they worry about, do I still have time? Can I still build a strong bond with my child? My experience has been that it’s never too late to strengthen our bond with our child. It’s much easier if we start at the beginning. It can be a lot more work if they’re older and we’ve not been aware of the bond and how to keep the bond strong, but as soon as we have the information, we can start building that because the bond exists from birth. Rather it get stronger or weaker depends on how it is nurtured. So parents can begin right where they are with this consciousness now that bond is a high priority and start being with children in a way that nurtures that connection.

CARMINE LEO: So what would be a couple of examples of things that parents can do with their children now that could help to strengthen and build that bond and connection?

PAM LEO: One of the primary things is having connection time everyday. To have special time each day, even ten minutes, minimum of ten minutes, where they totally focus on the child and you know, if it’s a very young child, a really effective way of doing it is to call the time they spend together by the child’s name. So it might be “Bobby time” or “Mary time” and the child knows that when it’s that time, they are going to have that parent’s undivided attention and really connect with them to have eye contact, to have physical contact, to play, to do something fun. The strongest way that we connect with children is by playing with them. So to incorporate that and just make that part of our everyday life that we’re going to have that time with them.

CARMINE LEO: So this is just one child, one parent, no other siblings or anybody else?

PAM LEO: Right. And that can be challenging to do when you have several young children and the other parent is away working, so then we have to look for resource. That’s where resource comes in. Some parents accomplish it by spending time with one while the younger one is napping, or spending time with the younger one when the other one is school or preschool, but looking for those opportunities where we get to spend that one on one special time with them. That’s one of the really important things that we can do.

The other is to have a weekly date and a date can be anything. It can be an hour, it can be an afternoon where the parent takes the child away from the rest of the family and just does something special with that one child and depending on what parents do have for resources, they may not be able to have a date with all of their children. You know, if they have four children, that’s four dates a week. So they may rotate it. But making sure that children know that the parent’s relationship with them is a high priority to them by spending time with them.

CARMINE LEO: Well, that sounds like a couple of great ideas and even in today’s complicated world, I am sure that pretty much any parent could figure out a way to pull those two off.

PAM LEO: They can and even if it’s not ten minutes, even if it’s five minutes.

CARMINE LEO: Yeah.

PAM LEO: It’s more about the consistency than the length of time. Some parents do it at bedtime by reading stories or the bedtime ritual. That is quality time, but it is a higher quality time when it includes eye contact and physical touch and so when I said that quality time cannot substitute for quantity of time, that is true and there is a difference in quality of time. If we sit and watch a video together, that will be a certain level of quality. We are together. We are sharing an experience, but that quality of time will be very different than the quality of time where we actively play with the child, you know, to play hide and go seek or chase, or wrestling, where there is a lot of connection, because in the same way that children have the cup that I talked about where they store their hurts, they also have their love cup and that’s the emotional fuel that they run on everyday.

CARMINE LEO: So there are two cups?

PAM LEO: Two cups. The one we want to keep empty and the one we want to keep full. The love cup is the one we want to keep full and we fill that cup through connecting with them and through playing with them and that is going to look different at every age and stage that a child is in. How we spend that ten minutes with a one-year-old is going to look different than how we spend it with a four-year-old or a ten-year-old or a fifteen-year-old.

CARMINE LEO: So it sounds like this is really a function of attention. In the example you gave, if we’re watching a video with our child, we may be with our child, but the attention is on the video.
PAM LEO: Right.

CARMINE LEO: If we’re with them and we’re playing with them, then the attention is actually on the child. That speaks to what you were saying earlier that children need that attention and that’s the core of the connection.

PAM LEO: I once heard, every child needs someone who thinks the sun rises and sets on them.

CARMINE LEO: Ahh.

PAM LEO: They need that loving connection with an adult who is devoted to them and that’s what they experience when we do that special time with them each day. That I am special, that someone cares about me, I matter.

CARMINE LEO: So, you know, you’ve described these seven weeks. If there was one thing that you had to tell people about the seven week workshop, what might that be?

PAM LEO: That it is a real change from the kind of parenting most of us see around us and the kind of parenting that most of us experienced. When people first heard about it, they tend to confuse it with permissive parenting and it’s not about permissive parenting at all. It’s really about building a foundation of love and that when people love and care about each other, we naturally want what’s good for each other and that there doesn’t have to be. You know, children are always going to be enthusiastic and they’re going to have lack of experience and they’re going to be children, but some of the behaviors that many parents are struggling with are not what I see as natural children behaviors. They are behaviors that result from hurts that children are carrying and the needs that they have that are not being met.

CARMINE LEO: You know, if you go to a bookstore and you walk down and you look at the parenting section, there are hundreds and hundreds of books on the shelves. I mean, you look at these titles and they all look like they have something to say. How is a parent to tell the difference between what is useful and valuable and what is not?

PAM LEO: That’s actually a question that I hear a lot in my classes is that parents will come and say, well, I read this book and it told me to do this, but then I read this book and it told me to do the exact opposite, and I don’t know what to do. I don’t know which one is right. And what I tell them is to just ask themselves the question, “If I do what this advice is telling me to do, will this strengthen my connection with my child, or will it weaken my connection with the child?” and any advice that would create disconnect, that would be coercion, that would weaken our bond is counterproductive advice because our strength of effectiveness with our children lies in that connection.

CARMINE LEO: So this wouldn’t simply work with a particular action, this would be a view that you could hold of an entire parenting philosophy if you were exploring.

PAM LEO: Absolutely. When parents question, what should I do in this situation? That’s the question that we can ask ourselves. Because when we develop a strong bond, two things happen. One is our parenting instincts are stronger if we have a strong bond and our children’s desire to stay in connection with us is stronger and that’s where the strength of the bond comes from. It increases our parenting instincts, so we are more likely to know what to do in a given situation because of our connection with that child. What we would do in a given situation with this child might be different than what we do in a situation with that child because of who they are and how they function in the world. So we need to have that bond with them so that we can respond to them in a way that will best serve them.

CARMINE LEO: I know in relationships, a lot of people work with counselors and therapists and there are all of these books about relationship. When people talk about relationships that really really work, at the core of it is this feeling of being known. It sounds like you’re talking about that with children, too.

PAM LEO: Absolutely. Children do need to be known. They need to know that someone sees them, that someone notices them, that someone cares about them. And we can only know them by spending time with them, by sharing experiences with them. But one of the really hard parts of parenting for parents today is both parents working, is the schedule that so many parents are trying to keep up so that if they’re away from their children all day, by the time they come back together at night, they’re already tired. Everybody is hungry. Everybody’s emotional cup is empty from the stress of being apart all day and having just those few precious hours in the evening to meet everybody’s need, for the parent’s need to do the things of life, just the laundry and packing lunches and baths and stories, and trying to eek out a few minutes for themselves.

How do we do life in a way, now knowing how essential this bond is? How do we do that? It will be different for every family. There is no one way to do it. There is no prescribed, well, if you’re doing connection parenting, then you do this every day. An example of that would be we often hear that the family should sit down to at least one, you know, to dinner together every night. Well, depending on the schedule that family lives or works, it might work that they have breakfast all together everyday so that they get that meal together everyday because they’re all someplace else at dinner time. So parents don’t need to think that I’m not doing it right because we’re not all having dinner together. The point is that the family comes together for a meal.

So that’s just kind of an example of how we can be creative in meeting the needs that children have to have a sense of family and a sense of belonging and to have their one on one time. So one day, one on one time might be in the morning because everyone else left early. Another day, it might be in the afternoon because you have a little window between picking up someone and dropping someone else off. So it will mean being creative everyday of how we’re going to find the time to make that connection everyday.

CARMINE LEO: I would like to switch tracks just a little bit here. I understand that you’re a founding member of the Alliance for Transforming the Lives of Children. Tell us about that group and what the mission is there.

PAM LEO: The Alliance for Transforming the Lives of Children is a group of parents and professionals and policy makers who are all keenly aware of the importance of the parent-child bond and equally aware that it is not in the consciousness of our culture and their goal and their mission is to support parents in having the information to have a strong bond with their children. To disseminate this information as widely as possible and to then support parents in applying the information. The new pilot project of the Alliance for Transforming the Lives of Children is the ATLC Warmline, which is a parent mentoring phone line where parents can call in with their parenting concerns and be connected with a parent mentor who can listen to them and help them with the challenges that they’re facing. Another way that we disseminate information is through the website, which is www.atlc.org, and parents can go there. Ten thousand hours I think were spent collecting the research and the information on what do children need to thrive? That information has been assembled into a document called, “The Blueprint”, which gives parents the information on what would be the optimal conditions for children to thrive as human beings.

CARMINE LEO: What are some of the points in that blueprint?

PAM LEO: The blueprint outlines really conception through early childhood of what are optimal conditions for children. What are optimal conditions in the womb? What are optimal birth conditions? What are optimal conditions for children in the first year of life? It talks about breastfeeding, about carrying babies, about keeping them in human contact, about consistency of caregiver and really up through the early years of how children are educated serve as a guideline for parents of what’s the best direction we can go in to give our children the best that we can give them. My experience of parents is that all parents want life to be better for their children than it was for them. I have never met a parent who didn’t and when parents have the information and the resources and the support to do that, then the whole family benefits.

CARMINE LEO: So what’s next for Pam Leo and for connection parenting?

PAM LEO: The book, Connection Parenting, parenting through connection instead of coercion, through love instead of fear, and the book will be published by Wyatt-Mackenzie Publishing and is expected to be out in November of 2005.

CARMINE LEO: And if people want to learn more about connection parenting, how can they get in touch with you?

PAM LEO: They can go to my website, which is www.connectionparenting.com and on my website, lists the classes that I teach. It lists all of the puzzle pieces as I call them, all of the books that I recommend, the books that I’ve gained from. The websites that I find valuable, articles that I have written for our local parenting paper, “Parent and Family”, my biography, and links to the resources page. Local resources that are in Maine, where I am, and national resources where parents can connect with the specific resources that they’re looking for.

CARMINE LEO: Well, great, thanks. I just want to say I really appreciate the time that you’ve taken today to do this with us. This is an enormously interesting body of work and I cannot wait to hear more.

]]>http://kindredmedia.org/2017/03/connection-parenting-lost-now-found-interview-pam-leo/feed/0Ducking Pies Presenting Birth Psychology For 34 Years: An Interview With Thomas Verny, MDhttp://kindredmedia.org/2016/11/ducking-pies-presenting-birth-psychology-34-years-interview-thomas-verny-md/
http://kindredmedia.org/2016/11/ducking-pies-presenting-birth-psychology-34-years-interview-thomas-verny-md/#commentsTue, 01 Nov 2016 23:59:39 +0000http://kindredmedia.org/?p=19447Thomas Verny, MD, shares his experience over 34 years of “ducking pies” presenting the science of birth psychology that, today, finds mainstream audiences through an award-winning documentary and international universities promoting Verny’s original wisdom of the foundation of human wellness beginning at conception. Dr. Verny first presented his insights in the best selling and internationally […]

Thomas Verny, MD, shares his experience over 34 years of “ducking pies” presenting the science of birth psychology that, today, finds mainstream audiences through an award-winning documentary and international universities promoting Verny’s original wisdom of the foundation of human wellness beginning at conception. Dr. Verny first presented his insights in the best selling and internationally acclaimed book, The Secret Life of the Unborn Child in 1982 and was recently featured in the award-winning documentary, In Utero, now available for on demand viewing.

In this interview, Dr. Verny shares the meaning behind his well-known quote, “Womb Ecology Becomes World Ecology” and his hope for continued social and public policy change to support pregnant mothers and babies.

Dr. Verny is a Canadian psychiatrist, writer and academic. He has previously taught at Harvard University, University of Toronto, York University, Toronto and St. Mary’s University Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Dr. Verny’s books, professional publications and founding of the PPPANA, now APPPAH, and the Pre- and Perinatal Journal, have established him as one of the world’s leading authorities on the effect of the prenatal and early postnatal environment on personality development. He lectures and leads workshops on Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Psychotherapy through-out Canada, the United States, Europe, South America and Southeast Asia.

Featured photo is Thomas Verny, MD, in the new documentary, In Utero. Watch In Utero on demand here and below.

Join Lisa Reagan for a Monday LIVE Lecture discussing the In Utero Film and Discussion Guide created by the nonprofit Dr. Verny co-founded, the Association for Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Health, APPPAH, and Kindred on November 21 at noon EDT. Find out more about APPAH’s Monday LIVE Lectures here.

LISA REAGAN: Welcome to Kindred, an international alternative media and non-profit initiative of Families for Conscious Living. This is Lisa Reagan and today I am talking with Thomas Verny, the author the bestselling and internationally acclaimed book, The Secret Life of the Unborn Child. Dr. Verny was recently featured in the award-winning documentary “In Utero”. He is also the founder of the Association for Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Health and has just returned from an eight lecture series in Chile to thousands of people. So, welcome Dr. Verny.

THOMAS VERNY: Thank you.

LISA REAGAN: So, 34 years since The Secret Life of the Unborn Child. What’s happened?

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THOMAS VERNY: Well, as you mentioned, we did start the Pre- and Perinatal Psychology Association of North America, as it was first called, and then it was changed to what it is now, APPPAH. We had a very good beginning. The first couple of years were very good and then there started to be sort of a waning of interest in pre- and perinatal psychology. I guess nothing very new was happening in that area and so we had a core membership I guess of about 200 people who would come to our biannual conferences, but then I did start our journal, the Pre- and Perinatal Psychology Association Journal and that helped and then we started a newsletter and that helped. And I would say that during the last 6 years or so, we have had a real revitalization, re-energizing of the whole area of pre- and perinatal psychology.

LISA REAGAN: What can you attribute that to?

THOMAS VERNY: That’s hard. It’s hard to say. I think that, in a way, people like myself and David Chamberlain, and many of the other sort of prominent leaders in the pre- and perinatal psychology field, you know, have been going around for years lecturing here and there like Johnny Appleseed, you know, seeding the world with our ideas and I guess it takes a certain amount of momentum before things take off, you know. I guess we have reached that stage, where there’s just, in fact there is so much good information about pre- and perinatal psychology and the importance of those first 9 months of life out in the world that when a few years ago, I tried to publish a new book in this area, most publishers said, well, this is not news. Give us something new. So having sort of been on the outskirts or on the perimeter of science, we have moved into the middle ground. So it has become acceptable to speak about pre- and perinatal psychology and the very best example of this has been my recent trip to Chile, which is why I’m really so excited about my experiences there, because there I actually spoke to something like 200 neonatologist doctors. Doctors in the past have been the most resistant of all of the professions to accept, you know, sort of the core concepts of pre- and perinatal psychology, yet, this time in South American, in Santiago, there was no criticism. There were no negative comments. It was like a different world.

LISA REAGAN: This was eight lectures in just a few days and one of the rooms was 500 people, standing room only, 2000 were streaming in. So this is a tremendously popular subject. It was piped into 29 hospitals, all across Chile. It was followed outside of Chile. I don’t know how they did that. I don’t know the mechanics of it. But you know, I am told that people from Argentina. There were 23 people from Argentina who were watching it. There were 21 from the USA, 15 from Columbia, 8 from Spain, you know, on and on and on. So not only in Santiago, not only in Chile, but people from all over South America, Spain, and even three people in Germany were watching it somehow. So I think that what that says to me is that the science of pre- and perinatal psychology is becoming mainstream and it is becoming accepted. You know, I no longer have to sort of duck the pies that are being thrown at me as metaphorically I’m speaking as I was in the past. You know, I would get on a radio show and people would say, well Dr. Verny, do you really believe that children can remember their birth? I mean, these were the kinds of questions I was being asked. When I spoke to doctors, you know, just looking at their faces, you know, it told me that they did not believe one thing that I was telling them. So things have really changed. I think that we are on the doorsteps of a real acceptance, as I have said, of some of the core concepts of pre- and perinatal psychology.

LISA REAGAN: Well, you were in the movie, the documentary that just came out on demand, “In Utero”, and they touched on, well, they use your quote, “The womb ecology becomes world ecology,” quite a bit and APPPAH does as well. It’s a great quote, but it is a tremendous stretch for most people to get their minds around.

THOMAS VERNY: So what it really means, if I may get in there, because I know that you are sort of time limited. What it really means is, that you know, a child that is conceived in love and seen through pregnancy with love and affection and acceptance and born in love is going to be a very different kind of a person than a person who has not had those kinds of advantages. Like a person, for example, who was conceived as the result of rape and who during the 9 months of pregnancy, the mother was under incredible stress. Should I keep this child? Should I abort it? So those feelings, those emotions are translated into neurohormones and also we are learning from epigenetics that they have a tremendous effect on the genome of the child because we are not our genes. We are the expression of our genes. In other words, some genes get turned on, some get turned off, and all of that is done through the environment. So what I am saying is that it is tremendously important how children are sort of treated from the beginning from conception on. So if we can protect the amniotic universe, the womb, so to speak. If we can keep out toxins, whether they happen to be chemical, physical, or psychological. If you can keep out these toxins, then that is equal to womb ecology and that will lead to world ecology. In other words, a more peaceful and a better world.

LISA REAGAN: So now that the message is becoming more mainstream in vehicles like this, “In Utero” documentary.

THOMAS VERNY: Yes.

LISA REAGAN: Which has been translated into ten languages and has won a lot of breakthrough documentary awards, what’s going to happen? Is society or public policy ready to shift to accommodate the science?

THOMAS VERNY: Yes, I think they’re moving towards that day. I think it’s going to take more work on our part, you know, more programs like the one that you are just making right now. We need to put this message out again and again and again until people really hear it. My book, for example, The Secret Life of the Unborn Child, the only way it got into the hands of academics and doctors was through their wives. No academic or doctor, as far as I know, ever picked up my book, The Secret Lift of the Unborn Child, in the 1980s. So it was the wives. It is usually the women who sort of tune into these sort of things first and then they pass it onto their husbands and we are still living in the world, but that is also changing and that is for the good, where women have more and more of a voice. But in the past, it was a patriarchal society and it was the men who really decided, you know, what is happening in the world. So if you ask me where I would be going, I think we are moving towards an acceptance of these ideas and then translating them as you pointed out quite rightly, into legislation, into public policy. If you take one example, the treatment of pain in newborn children, okay. Twenty or thirty years ago, nobody paid any attention to giving children who were being operated on, who were having all kinds of surgical procedures any anesthetics or analgesics. It was believed that they did not feel the pain. I mean, this is incredible. It drove me crazy to witness that and to hear doctors say, well, even if they feel pain, they’re going to forgot it. Well, that’s nonsense. They’re not going to forget it. It’s inscribed in their brains forever. So only gradually has that changed as a result of some really really fine doctors, particularly at the Massachusetts General Hospital in the 1980s, who wrote papers about this and published in the New England Journal of Medicine and since that time, things have changed. That one area, for example, that has been I think influenced by pre- and perinatal psychology. So there will be other areas.

LISA REAGAN: So in the mean time, who is, in the countries that you’ve visited, who seems to be doing it well? Because I know the United States is the only developed country that has no paid parental leave and really high rates of maternal morbidity. I think we’re the winner in that category and black mothers are five times more likely to die in childbirth.

THOMAS VERNY: That’s right. That’s right.

LISA REAGAN: So is anyone, has anyone pioneered a model for how to accommodate the science?

THOMAS VERNY: You mean, in Chile? Or in the United States?

LISA REAGAN: Yeah, well, for example, Chile, any country.

THOMAS VERNY: Well, I was there only for two weeks, so I cannot say that I am an expert on Chile in any way, shape, or form. But I know that, for example, in Concepcion, which is the second largest city, you know, there is a course which they call primal health, which in Spanish sounds better than it sounds in English. But they have had a primal health diploma course for ten years, it’s a two year course. They’ve had it for ten years now. The lady who leads it, Yolando Carrera, has been an absolutely pioneer in this area in Chile and she is well-known all over the country. She has introduced this course 10 years ago with the help of Michel Odent, which is, you know, another prominent obstetrician, who has been working towards humanizing childbirth for a very long time. So that course has been well-recognized and they hope to change it to a masters level next year. I would love to see courses like that in the United States and Canada at universities. I don’t think that we will ever see pre- and perinatal psychology concepts widely accepted until they are taught at the university level. Because doctors only believe what they are taught at the university and no matter how many books I or my colleagues write, that to them is not important. The important thing is what their professors said when they were young students at the university. So if it’s not taught at the university, it does not really exist.

LISA REAGAN: Where does that leave professionals? Birth workers and parents, who, I’ll tell you an example, I just talked with Samsarah Morgan, who is the executive director at the Oakland Better Birth Center in California and they watched the “In Utero” movie and one mother who was pregnant was watching you talk in the movie, began to cry, and then the center director said she began to cry, and later when they had the group discussion about what was it that was moving for them, the young mother said, “Well, I thought this was true, but everybody said it wasn’t. So now I’m going to act like it is.”

THOMAS VERNY: Right. Right. Right. Well, that’s wonderful. That’s absolutely wonderful. You know, like I said, your program and movies like “In Utero” and other programs are going to change public perception of what these first 9 months and the first few months after birth really mean. I only talk about hard science, like all of my lectures, I don’t usually tell, perhaps one or two case studies or anecdotes, but most of it is just hard studies from the best universities in North America and they are all proving my point, okay, which is that these first 9 months of life are tremendously important and will set the direction for the life of this person forever, you know. It is a little bit like a gravitational pull, you know. We don’t think of gravity, but just try to jump up and stay up, okay, gravity is going to bring you down very quickly. It’s the same thing with these experiences that we have at a very young age, okay. We are inscribed in our system, in our whole body, not just the brain, but you know, in all the cells of our body, they are inscribed and they exert a kind of psychological gravitational pull. All our actions, all of our thoughts and feelings are influenced by our past experiences. I mean, this is so simple. You know, I mean, you don’t need to be a genius to understand that. People somehow, scientists, for the longest time, have acted as if birth was the beginning of life. That is ridiculous, because we have had 9 months of development before we were born and those 9 months don’t count, come on!

LISA REAGAN: So the movie just talks about the problem, they say. They’re outlining the problem that is caused by our imprint. But Stephen Gyllenhaal, the film maker/producer has said that he is going to make an “In Utero 2” and he is going to talk about some of the solutions and modalities and healing possibilities for birth trauma and just for this imprint. Do you see that being received well out there? Those ideas?

THOMAS VERNY: Well, let’s see. It’s not as simple as that. Well, you asked me about womb ecology and world ecology and I was telling you, you know, that a loved child is going to become a loving person of all things being equal and a hated, you know, unloved, uncared for child is going to become a pretty negative individual, right? So there you have the seeds of positivity and negativity. It’s not all negative, at all. Children, you know, who are well cared for right from the beginning, they won’t need to have any psychotherapy or drugs or anything like that. They’ll be happy, well-adjusted people. That’s the objective that we have in the pre- and perinatal psychology field. Let’s protect the children from the beginning from toxic substances, as I have said, whether they are mental or physical, and let’s give them lots of love and care. That will change the world in the long run, very long run.

LISA REAGAN: Very long run. So preventative is really what we want to look at.

THOMAS VERNY: Well, I mean, if we look at the world and the mess that it is in now, you know, it is not a pretty picture. Whatever we do in pre- and perinatal psychology in North America and South America and perhaps Europe is wonderful, but is it ever going to reach Ethiopia or Syria or you know, Libya, or any of those places that are just, you know, in the midst of wars and destruction? No, probably not, not for a long time. So my hopes are high for the western world, but of course there is a whole other world that we are not reaching.

LISA REAGAN: Right. So what else would you like our listeners to know?

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THOMAS VERNY: What else would I like them to know? Well, I think I would like them to know that life does not begin at birth, but it begins at conception. I think that is tremendously important. I would like them to understand that your genes are not your destiny, that it is the expression of genes that makes you who you are and that depends on the kind of life that you live. If you want to have healthy children, live a healthy life yourself. In other words, you know, even before you conceive a child, you should already be in good shape both physically and mentally. That is going to make a difference to your child because how you and the father of the child are will effect that child for a lifetime. So I would like them to know that. I think that treating the unborn child already as a very very young person is very important, okay. We are not dealing with a little goldfish in a bowl of water. We are dealing with a potential human being. So it’s important to try to communicate with that child from the beginning to send positive messages into the womb to talk to the baby, to sing to the baby, and of course, to have as healthy a childbirth as possible, and to have perhaps a doula or a midwife present, to get out of the hospital as soon as you can because hospitals are for sick people. Then, very very important, to spend a lot of time with your newborn child. It’s very important to talk to the child and to hold the child and to breastfeed the child, which is good for the child and the mother. There’s a lot of research to show that women who breastfeed have lower rates of cancer, for example. So, all of those things need to be done and then our population is going to get healthier from generation to generation and hopefully, you know, in a few generations, at least North America and Western Europe is going to become a healthier place to live in.

LISA REAGAN: Let’s hope so. What is up next for you? Are you still traveling?

THOMAS VERNY: Yes. I don’t travel too much. I don’t enjoy traveling as much as I used to. You know, going to an airport now is such a hassle, going through those search and destroy missions there, you know, they yell at you, “Take your belt off! Take your shoes off!” Oh my God, I hate this. I just hate it. So I don’t travel that much. But, yes, I am also working on a new book, and I do like to speak to people who are interested about this subject. I am pretty busy.

LISA REAGAN: Well, I appreciate you taking time to talk with us today and I want to let our listeners know that you can get a transcript of our talk at Kindredmedia.org and if you are a professional and interested in studying birth psychology, please visit the venerable organization created by Dr. Verny, the Association for Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Health, APPPAH, and you can find them at birthpsychology.com. You can find a prenatal and perinatal educator certificate course there as well as the Conscious Baby Parent Program, which will be debuting in 2017. So you have initiated quite a bit here, Dr. Verny, and thank you very much for sticking in and ducking all of those pies.

THOMAS VERNY: It was a pleasure. And I love the fact that no pies have been thrown.

]]>http://kindredmedia.org/2016/11/ducking-pies-presenting-birth-psychology-34-years-interview-thomas-verny-md/feed/1Womb Ecology Becomes World Ecology: In Utero Filmmakers Interview And New On Demand Viewing Insightshttp://kindredmedia.org/2016/10/womb-ecology-becomes-world-ecology-utero-filmmakers-interview-new-demand-viewing-insights/
http://kindredmedia.org/2016/10/womb-ecology-becomes-world-ecology-utero-filmmakers-interview-new-demand-viewing-insights/#respondTue, 11 Oct 2016 15:55:07 +0000http://kindredmedia.org/?p=19337WHY WE SHOULD CARE “What we’re not recognizing is that people are parenting and conceiving and carrying and birthing children under increasingly stressed conditions. Increasingly, it takes two people now to provide a living in this culture to families. And they’re doing so in the context of less support because one of the ravages of […]

“What we’re not recognizing is that people are parenting and conceiving and carrying and birthing children under increasingly stressed conditions. Increasingly, it takes two people now to provide a living in this culture to families. And they’re doing so in the context of less support because one of the ravages of industrialization and globalization is the destruction of the extended family, the tribe, the clan, the village, the neighborhood. Parents who are stressed have been shown not to be able to be as attuned with their infants and children as parents who are not stressed. Not their fault. Not because they do not love the child. Not because they’re not dedicated, devoted, committed. Simply because the stress effect impedes their ability to attune with their child…And that has an impact on brain development.” – Gabor Maté, MD, quote from In Utero

ABOUT THE INTERVIEW

CLICK ON THE GRAPHIC TO WATCH OR PURCHASE THE FILM NOW

In Utero documentary filmmakers, Kathleen and Stephen Gyllenhaal, discuss the film’s breakthrough year at film festivals resulting in its translation into ten languages and multiple awards, including the San Diego International Film Festival’s Breakthrough Documentary Award in October 2016.

The documentary is set to be released for on-demand viewing on October 11, 2016. In anticipation of the on-demand release, Kathleen and Stephen speak to some of the hardest questions they have faced from international audiences, including: Why is the film so dark? Should pregnant mother see it? Is it a pro-life film?

The filmmakers share the need to present the solid and multiple fields of science that all arrive at the same conclusion during the course of the film: womb ecology becomes world ecology.

Watch In Utero’s trailer at the bottom of this page.

ABOUT THE FILM

A cinematic rumination on life in the womb and its lasting impact on human development, human behavior, and the state of the world. Fetal origins experts, research scientists, psychologists, doctors and midwives, as well as examples from popular culture and mythology, collectively demonstrate how our experiences in utero shape our future. In the year since its film premier at the Seattle International Film Festival, In Utero has been translated into ten languages and won multiple awards. The film is available for on demand viewing and purchase as of October 11, 2016 on iTunes, Amazon and VUDU.

BUY OR RENT THE FILM NOW

Visit the In Utero website to find more resources, including screenings, of the film at www.inuterofilm.com.

Discover more about birth psychology at the Association for Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Health at www.birthpsychology.com.

LISTEN TO THE IN UTERO FILMMAKERS’ INTERVIEW

WOMB ECOLOGY BECOMES WORLD ECOLOGY

In Utero Filmmakers On The Documentary’s Groundbreaking Science And Messages, Audio Interview Transcript

Stephen and Kathleen Gylleenhaal at the San Diego International Film Festival accepting the Breakthrough Documentary Award in October 2016.

LISA REAGAN: Welcome to Kindred, an alternative media and non-profit initiative of Families for Conscious Living. This is Lisa Reagan, and today I am talking with the filmmakers of the documentary, In Utero, Stephen and Kathleen Gyllenhaal. In Utero premiered at the Seattle Film Festival in 2015 and over the past year has traveled to film festivals around the world. It has also been translated into ten languages and won multiple awards. Welcome, Kathleen and Stephen.

KATHLEEN GYLLENHAAL: Hi.

STEPHEN GYLLENHAAL: Hi, how are you doing?

LISA REAGAN: I am so happy to have you both here. We did have a call last year and our readers can download or read that interview online, but you just were bringing the movie out and you weren’t sure how the audiences were going to react to it, so I look forward to hearing how the festivals and screenings went. But I would like to ask Kathleen if you would start us off with a little bit of an overview to bring anyone who doesn’t know what the film is about up to speed.

KATHLEEN GYLLENHAAL: Sure, so In Utero is a feature length documentary that explores the origins of who we are and how we come to be who we are and it does that by looking, as you can imagine, the title suggests, at prenatal life. And we delve into a lot of research and we talk to a lot of scientists and psychologists and midwives and doctors and a bunch of people who all shed light on fetal origins, that is, what happens during our earliest time in the womb. The film really starts to talk about how the environment plays a huge part on how we are impacted at such an early early time in our development and that first environment, of course, is our mother’s womb. So everything that the mother is experiencing and going through emotionally and physically has an impact on us and that, you know, really brings us into some very interesting territory. I won’t go too deep into it because I’m sure we will talk more about it during this interview, but it starts to shed light on why the species is the way it is and why we are how we are in the 21st century. So the film begins to take on kind of a philosophical point of view as well as we look at the state of the world.

Why Is The Film So Dark?

LISA REAGAN: I love the film. I have been doing this Conscious Parenting Movement work for almost 19 years now and the film is a tremendous vehicle for the science that’s been around, as some of the presenters say in the film, for 50 years. But what you’ve done is you’ve brought coherence to all of these fields of science. There are more than one field presented in the film and you have made this amazing connection that is both profound and obvious between our origins in life and then as you say, the state of our planet right now. I would like to start there and ask about the darkness of the movie and the fact that it is presenting this problem and it is grounded in science, but it really can throw some viewers for a loop to hear this for the first time.

KATHLEEN GYLLENHAAL: I’ll start and then, I’m sure Stephen will want to chime in as well. What I think is difficult for some people, but also very provocative for others, is that we’re saying womb is not this paradise. One of our experts in the film describes it that way. It is not the paradise that we’ve all been led to believe. It’s actually a very complicated environment that we start out in and we as a fetus are absorbing all of the stress and trauma that is going around the mother, you know, and the society around her, the culture around her. We actually come into this world with this sort of imprint that spans back generations. This is called transgenerational trauma. It is passed down to us. But of course, that’s hard for people to hear. But what we are trying to say is that once you can identify that this is what has been going on forever and no one has really identified and stated it, at least in my knowledge in a documentary film and once this becomes more generally acknowledged and accepted, then we can start to forge ahead with how we can stop this transmission of trauma from generation to generation and we can really start to turn things around and we can really start to heal and evolve as a species. So what I say to people who say this is kind of gloomy and dark, I say well, you have to acknowledge what’s wrong first before we can find the solution and so it’s actually a positive thing.

STEPHEN GYLLENHAAL: I think as we tried to figure out how to structure the film and cut the film, it was sort of like trying to help an audience understand and help ourselves even understand quantum physics or quantum theory. We have all lived in the Newtonian era where one plus one equals two, but what has really emerged over the last 50-60 years almost in tandem with the discoveries in this field has been the awareness of quantum physics, which is basically saying that everything effects everything else. So it is profoundly complex and almost as difficult to understand as when back everyone felt the world was flat because the world certainly looked flat and it all seemed to function flat, but it took a long time to understand that the world was round. This is the same kind of issue. It is a profoundly different way of looking at who we are because everyone I think believed, you know, it all started at birth. Now we understand it just takes a moment to sort of logically figure it out – well of course, the time that we were developing in utero is probably the most profound time and all of the things that effect that, for instance, genetics and this new field epigenetics, but if we just stay with the field of genetics for a moment, the genetics go back generation after generation after generation, so trauma from wars in the past have been proven scientifically on a molecular cellular level to have had an effect on the genetics of that generation and that continues down through this era now. So when we see people behaving badly now and when we see the state of the world now, we can begin to understand the causes of it. It is difficult news, but it is in a difficult place right now. It is in a dark place. That’s one of the reasons that this election is so troubling for so many people, but there is a cause. There is a way out. There is a way of resolving and I think underneath many people unconsciously, deeply feel hopeless. It is just hopeless, so just go on and live your life. This is really just saying, it is not hopeless at all. There really is a way through using science and through using psychology and through using all of the things that we now have at our disposal to make our lives not just survive, but that actually flourish.

Should Pregnant Mothers See The Film?

LISA REAGAN: In the film, Thomas Verny talks about genes being the blueprint for the house, and then you have Carrie Breton from Keck School of Medicine saying, yup you’ve got your blueprint, you’ve got your genes, but the cells of the sperm of the egg are kind of scrubbed out before they unite and then during embryogenesis there’s this other clearing. I think this piece is important because some people will only hear we are inheriting all of this transgenerational stuff and we have no control over it. The message right here at this juncture of the movie is actually the body and nature intelligence does a great deal to prepare the fetus for wholeness and wellness; however, the other presenters that now come forward and bring out the epigenetics part, which is the environment, the womb. Are we going to have good experiences? Are we going to have bad experiences? We are hoping for more good than bad, but the culture that we are currently in, as Gabor Maté talks about over and over again, continually hijacks our bodies and our neurobiology and this doesn’t begin after birth, it begins at conception. This is the piece that people find profound because we want to believe that babies come into the world as unconscious blank slates according to the Newtonian model, because God forbid everything that’s been done to them up to this point, they actually experienced consciously. So let me just ask, because the film is dark, do you think pregnant mothers should see the film?

KATHLEEN GYLLENHAAL: Well, you know, I’ve gotten some feedback that goes both ways. So when we’ve taken the film and we’ve done our answered questions and done Q&As and talked to a lot of people afterwards. I really feel it is almost 50/50. Some women say, come up to me pregnant and just thrilled that this film is there. They understand that it is tough, but they are grateful to have this information and I myself, having been pregnant during the making of this film and being hyper aware that all of the stress studies and all of the stress that impacts the fetus in pregnant women and so I had to navigate through all of that and I do understand, I was angry, I was frustrated. How do I… the irony was not lost on me. How do I get rid of this stress so I can be a wonderful vessel for my child? But, you know, learning what I learned helped me find some ways to reduce that stress and so I think it really depends on the woman, the mother, herself. I think it is up to her to decide. We had a midwife not long ago at a screening say I would never show this to any woman that I was working with, any pregnant woman. I thought, well, okay, that’s your opinion, but I would ask her, you know, these are the things that this film is going to lay out. You can even go to our website and look at the information. Maybe that’s less confrontational, but that’s really up to her. I say that again, based on the feedback that I’ve gotten from women who seemed that they’ve want to know and I wanted to know everything that I could know. I also feel that people will be able… well, I’ll let Stephen jump in about this as well.

STEPHEN GYLLENHAAL: Well, hey, I think now our little boy who was in utero during the making of this very very stressful dark movie, he is now 2 years old and I would warn people a little bit that he’s got a will of his own. He is very very creative. He is a handful. He is a full three dimensional really really amazing human being, so I can’t help but feel that the truth, even though it’s dark, seems to have played well with him. I guess ultimately it is the choice of the mother and people have to be very very careful. We live in complicated times. I do believe that the truth sets you free and that’s what this is about. The other thing that I would say is all of these quantum issues, trans-generational trauma, the environment in utero, how does stress work, how do the hormones work, going between the mother into the placenta into the baby, all of these kinds of things, we have to be incredibly forgiving of ourselves. You know, one of the things that makes me slightly weary about some of the new age people that I know and while I’m more inclined towards hard science is that there seems to be a sense that everything should be kind of wonderful. I don’t think that we’re at that point in the species. You know, you have a 2-year-old, you have a 1-year-old, you raise a child. You’re pregnant. It’s difficult, this stuff. But we should be… I think the key is to be unjudgemental, to be forgiving, to be open… I think it’s… for women to feel that they can watch it, that’s fine. They’re figuring it out themselves for the women and men who feel that they can watch it. That’s fine as well. We’re working our way slowly towards a very very exciting future. It really is evolution. That’s really what we’re speaking about is evolution. We’re right in the middle of that process. So I think it’s up to the mother and father. I’ll speak to the fathers. The one other thing that I would add is that being aware of the need for choice. We’ve been working on a shorter version, a 45-50 minute version of the movie that is more directed towards pregnant women that leaves out some of the harder pieces of information and also brings in some issues that are supportive because we understood this. So maybe one way of coming out… we need a little bit of money to get that version finished… it’s always with documentaries you need to get funding and we’re doing the best we can. But if we can get that version up and running, then maybe that is the first stage, and then you’ll watch… then if you feel comfortable with it, you’ll watch the second version of it.

LISA REAGAN: Right. So, when you say new age, what piece of it do you think is the new age part?

STEPHEN GYLLENHAAL: Well, I mean, I have grown up through the 60s and 70s and all of the new age kind of, I mean, it is something wonderful about the new age, we are speaking about, you know, you can even go so far as you know, the Age of Aquarius or whatever, which is sort of interesting, because I think as that’s been happening we’ve been moving in, as I say to quantum thinking. So I think it is essentially the new age speaks to a process of really evolution. I just think it’s maybe a little harder than we thought than we were younger and in some ways more interesting too.

Is This Film Pro-Life?

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LISA REAGAN: Okay, here’s another hard question about the film that people have right away and you all experienced this when you started to bring it out to film festival’s and that is, is there an ulterior motive here of a pro-life message? I know that’s not true because you address it in the film, but for the sake of our listeners who haven’t seen the film yet, how do you address that? How did you address that to audiences worldwide?

KATHLEEN GYLLENHAAL: Well, we definitely had no agenda along those lines and, but we realized the minute you start talking about the fetus, especially when the development of the fetus and what the fetus is absorbing and we even say feeling in the sense of absorbing the stress and the other hormones and emotions from the mother. You know, you’re going to run up against this debate, of course. So we knew that we were walking into this. So we began asking all of our interview subjects to respond to that question of what do you feel about pro-life versus pro-choice in the context of your work? So there is a section in the middle of the film that addresses that. And all, for the most part, the majority just said this is just what we’re finding and we are not, we’re doing this outside of any kind of agenda, our research. Some of the interviews, some of the experts said, for now, we kind of need abortion because we haven’t figured out, you know, when you look at the unwanted child and all of the research out there that looks at the life of the unwanted child after birth is not a happy one. We haven’t figured out how to make all pregnancies wanted.

LISA REAGAN: Right.

KATHLEEN GYLLENHAAL: We haven’t figured out a way as a society yet to really support pregnant mothers, support children, support life in such a way that we won’t have unwanted pregnancies anymore. So until that happens, abortion is a necessary thing.

STEPHEN GYLLENHAAL: Also, I think, this is an interesting film. When you make a film, you bring… Kathleen has brought herself to the film and her beliefs, and I have my own beliefs and supportive of that as well and you make a film and what can happen if a film really works and we have found this film really really worked is that it becomes something beyond even what your own beliefs are. One of the things we did very early, because we were very worried about this subject, we are very very pro-choice. We gave it to a couple of friends who are kind of experts in the field of media and one of them said something very interesting because he had some pro-life people look at it and pro-choice people look at it. He said what’s interesting is whatever you thought you were doing, the film seems to move beyond the existing paradigm, which is very conflict driven. It seems to move beyond these issues into sort of the next paradigm, which is not necessarily where we’re at, but the film seems to have moved that way. And frankly, to my surprise, and to our surprise, I think, so far, there’s been very very little conflict around this. People have not really confronted us about this issue very much. Now, as it goes into general release next week, we may start to get that. I think it’s a very interesting conversation to have and a conversation that I think we and certainly I welcome because I think just like in this election, we find ourselves in the old paradigm at war with each other. The next paradigm, the quantum paradigm, is going to really make everything be able to be included. Both sides have a point and both sides should be listening to each other because what really matters is not the right or the left, or pro-choice or pro-life, but what really matters is that fetus that’s developing there that’s the future. That future children and future generations, it’s the future of the species. That’s what I think the film really focuses on more than anything else.

LISA REAGAN: Well, I think you’re absolutely right. It does take you out of the cultural trap of pro-life and pro-choice, which is a cultural trap and because the movie is moving us towards empathy for humanity and empathy for ourselves as individuals, you end up in that place and now you are in a different paradigm. The cultural trap seems over simplified, unempathetic and unintelligent. So that is true. I would say anyone watching the film would come away with that. It is made very very clear.

So let me just say a couple of things about culture. Because I have found in my work over the years with parents, it’s hard to get people to see the context of their lives. It’s difficult to get them to look at transgenerational trauma or the culture that surrounds us daily, hijacking our neurobiology, but Gabor Maté is very good in the film and going to the core issue which is now we have two parents that have to work. We have no paid leave in the US. We have the highest maternal morbidity rate in the US. So it’s really important for adults who are considering bringing children into the world to understand there is context for this decision that you’re making. Can you say a little bit more about that? I know you just released the piece on imprint.

KATHLEEN GYLLENHAAL: Stephen, do you want…?

STEPHEN GYLLENHAAL: Well, I think maybe what you’re speaking to is how does a woman who has a career, who has worked hard to get to the place or even now she may now be getting equal pay to a man, which is outrageous, but she has got a very good job. She is very effective, and now she wants to have a child, and all of the research is saying it is very critical that she around that child, bonding with that child from the time of conception onwards. How do you balance that? First of all, I don’t think it’s easy. I think, as with all of the things we are bringing up, it’s not easy. I don’t think you would talk with anyone who is a parent who says it is easy. The only people who imagine it is easy are the people who haven’t had children. But it doesn’t make it even remotely impossible. I’ve been involved with raising other children. I have two grown children who are very successful and their mother worked all of the time and I am seeing Kathleen working very hard as Luke is growing up and it’s been very clear to me that they have benefited from having a mother that has a full engaged productive life outside of raising the children, that it supports the raising of children. Now, the other piece that I would mention and I think that it is very critical is the father. That, you know, there is a change that has been happening very slowly and controversially. The father does not just go off and work all of the time. That, you know, that he’s also participating in that, supporting this process, and by the way, by the fact that two parents are parenting with two different ideas often has been proven scientifically to be vastly superior for a child from the very start that there can sometimes be more than one point of view. In our situation, of course, I’m always right, and Kathleen isn’t, but aside from that, you know, it’s kind of…

KATHLEEN GYLLENHAAL: In your world, Stephen, in your world…

LISA REAGAN: Well, let’s take that a little… let’s take that even further and that’s back to what you were saying earlier, what you touched on, is where we are culturally right now. It seems the film is pointing to we have a population of babies. You know, it’s the Mr. Smith that’s in the Matrix up there that’s in a protectionist stand. So when you look at what is happening culturally now and after watching the movie, you see the protectionism is coming from basically a disrupted or undeveloped neurobiology it seems. Is that where you were going earlier?

STEPHEN GYLLENHAAL: I think that it is both neurobiology and psychology. The thing is, there are so many issues and so many different points of view about what is a human being, but certainly from a neurobiological point of view, yeah, there seems to be what is the neurobiological effect of trauma in utero or even trans-generational trauma on the fetus? What happens with that? Does this developing organism then split off from that trauma and then try and protect having to deal with that trauma? I mean, these are very complicated, almost quantum-like issues, which the film in a way we can talk about them here, but it is almost better to see the film and then talk about it afterwards.

Watch The Matrix Now

KATHLEEN GYLLENHAAL: I was just going to say like it took months and months and months, you know, a year and a half to edit the film, and that section on the imprint which we used The Matrix, the popular blockbuster sci-fi movie, one of our experts really reinterpreted and analyzed the film in terms of being plugged into not The Matrix, but an imprint which is passed down from generations. It tooks months and months even just to edit that sequence because it was so complicated and you said earlier Lisa we brought, there were all of these different fields that we sort of tied together and I just wanted to revisit that. I explained that with the exceptions of just a couple of people that we interviewed that knew one or the other interview subjects, these people were working all in isolation from each other in their own fields or sub-fields and they all arrived at this same general idea about the imprint. So one of the most challenging and exciting things about making this film was being able to tie that all together and in a way bring all of that together, in other words, bring all of these people together in the context of this film and build this community around, whoa, everyone discovered this at the same time from totally different angles. So that was really exciting. So back to what Stephen was saying, rent the film tomorrow, Tuesday October 11 when it comes out and watch this, because it’s really an amazing discovery that has not been unified anywhere else I think. It’s hard to describe it in simple language. But cinematically, I think we are able to capture it.

STEPHEN GYLLENHAAL: As an example, the fetus is not an intellectual construct. The fetus has feeling and an intellect as it is developing, as we as adults do. Film really primarily works best as emotional experience, as audiences having an emotional experience. There is an intellectual aspect to it. So there is a section in the film about the, with the Little Mermaid, the animated film the Little Mermaid and there’s a moment when this sort of monstrous mother-like figure rises out of the water and there’s the little mermaid and her prince I remember always feeling this is an emotional way, unconsciously sort of with an audience watching it to talk about the seeming force of the mother for a fetus. So it’s a way of not intellectualizing, but allowing someone to experience. I mean, you probably remember that section of the movie. It’s, it’s, one of the issues is you get the emotional experience of this rising powerful almost destructive mother. So that allows that feeling to go to the audience. The next part of it is to go, you may even feel that about your mother, but then you got to put in the very very important piece of trans-generational trauma because it is not the mother’s fault that this imprint happens that the fetus is imprinted with the mother’s negative material, problematic material. It is about the mother being, not even wanting to do it, but carrying the genetic structure of past trauma. But even as I try to describe it, I get frustrated, so you need to see the film, experience the film to begin to understand what is profoundly complicated when you first think about it, but it is really simple when you realize, oh the world is not flat, the world is round. It explains everything. It just takes a while to make that leap and the film is attempting to do that.

LISA REAGAN: I do think it does it beautifully. I love the pieces that you’ve incorporated in there. They’re very visceral. They can move the viewer easily into the places you want them to go, including with the alien movie that is literally visceral. Watching Sigourney Weaver give birth, as you said earlier, in this unwanted child segment. I should pause here and say to the reader, while the movie is complex and deep, it is also broken into sections that makes it easily digestible. You understand what’s coming next. Now they’re going to talk about the imprint. Now we’re going to go beyond the blueprint. Now we’re going to have the tales from the womb. So you can more easily go okay, alright, this is what we’re doing, which is how I had to watch it because I watched it a couple of times now and that’s great.

STEPHEN GYLLENHAAL: Thank you.

Will There Be An In Utero 2?

LISA REAGAN: So let me ask you what you’re doing now? I know you’re writing for the Huffington Post and you have a couple of projects in mind for how to keep the momentum of the movie now that it is coming out on demand viewing, as you said. What is it that you’re going to do? Where are you going to take us next?

STEPHEN GYLLENHAAL: Well, I wouldn’t say it is so much now the momentum of the movie. It’s more the momentum of this movement, of this, which includes, you, your organization, people in Amsterdam, South America, Russia, Netherlands, all over the place. How do we get this new knowledge out into the world to protect this incoming generation and the generations to come and also to help people who are in pain and many people are, figure out why they are in pain. Because so much of it has to do with what happened in utero. So with that in mind even more than this movie, we are as you said, talking about In Utero 2. We are talking about cutting a shorter version of In Utero 1 to make it more palatable for those women who feel uncomfortable about facing that much material and we are also developing a reality TV show called Making Modern Babies which is going to take some of the experts we met around the world and have them work with four pregnant women as they go through the process. So all of those things are strategies. And then I think we are going to be moving towards those political groups that are involved with, you know, family leave in the United States and trying to have this country duplicate what’s going on in other countries and I think with the other countries have them expand it as well. Those groups would be doing that and we want to sort of be supportive of all of that. So those are sort of where we’re going.

KATHLEEN GYLLENHAAL: I think one of the things we’ve learned and it has just been fascinating and wonderful, as we’ve been screening the film festivals and special events throughout the year leading up to our digital release, we’ve met more and more groups around the world who have actually kind of taken the film and then helped us promote it because they believe so much in it and these are groups that deal with not only, you know, midwives and doulas, you know and the pregnancy and birthing communities, but we have found more and more people dealing with adult trauma, so that is what Stephen was bringing up. Because the film really is mainly about trauma as it effects everybody, no matter what age and what interests us now coming back to this point of you have to bring up the problem first before you can bring up the solution is the natural sequel to this film would be a film that focuses on how do we treat this? How do we begin to reverse this? Because of our travels with the film, we’ve met some wonderful groups that have introduced us to more therapies that do go back to in utero memories, so unconscious memories that are still in the body before the fetus had a verbal intellectual context, it had preconscious memories and these treatments and these therapies go back to that time. And once that memory is unlocked and examined, the idea is then we can move beyond it. So the more we get to know these groups, the more the sequel naturally starts to form. So we obviously can’t do much until we get funding for that and everything, but that’s where we’re headed.

STEPHEN GYLLENHAAL: I would also add one last personal note in all of this. You know, we’ve both, but I’ll talk and speak about me, I’ve taken advantage of some of the therapies that we’ve encountered and you kind of work your way through this material and I think where I am right now in my life, I could have never have imagined 10 years ago having the energy to do everything we just discussed with you plus also still very much working in the Hollywood community. I do TVs. I have a movie that’s coming out. Kathleen and I are going to be doing a movie together, a narrative film as well, plus we’re raising a toddler, and it looks like we’re actually going to get another dog, which I think is nuts, but we’re going to do it anyway. So what we’ve encountered in this as well is a slowly releasing ourselves from our own trauma in utero, facing it, the bleak bleak elements of it, and I can speak about my own life in various times, it’s been very difficult, but now finding the energy to not just have a happy life because I do, but also a productive life. That’s, you know, a very important piece in all of this. It’s not just an intellectual exercise by any stretch of the imagination. It’s living real three dimensional life on planet earth at this moment, as troubling as it is, it’s a very hopeful time to be alive.

LISA REAGAN: I do really appreciate you bring that piece up. In our pre-call, I warned Stephen and Kathleen that my job as an activist is to tell the story and to try to help everyone move towards the New Story, as we call it on Kindred, which is a different paradigm. None of us are there. We are all in the space between stories. But the hope of healing and what it really offers when we shrug off the old story and the old skin and the old narrative is real. I wrote about this last month when Joseph Chilton Pearce died. If it hadn’t been for my encounter with his work when I was a young mother, I was very hopeless about where am I and how am I supposed to navigate this realm, that I couldn’t anticipate and I did try to prepare. I waited until I was 33 to have a child. But then once I was there, I needed somebody to give me the blueprint, the foundational piece of this is the cultural piece, this is the biological imperative, and here’s what possible. Here’s where we are capable of going as human beings if we have the support that we need and especially in utero. I appreciate so much both of you. I appreciate you coming on and sharing where you’ve been and where the movie is going next and you said, not the movie, the movement. So, is there anything else that you’d like to share with our listeners before we go?

KATHLEEN GYLLENHAAL: Well, I’ll just want to reiterate that after a year of showing the film around the world, as you said, it is coming out online on iTunes, Vimeo, Vudu, GooglePlay… I am forgetting a couple. Xbox. On October 11. So you can rent it or purchase it there and you know, we have a very active Facebook presence, In Utero film, and also on Instagram and Twitter, so you know, the website as well, inuterofilm.com is a great place to go to see where all of this information kind of converges. But the online social community on Facebook is a very dynamic place where people are coming and talking and sharing their stories. So we’re going to be focusing a lot on that as well as we move forward. So we hope that people can visit those sites.

STEPHEN GYLLENHAAL: Be truthful and honest and express what they feel they’ve learned and they believe and whether it’s in agreement or not, that’s the conversation that we all need to have right now. Huffington Post, by the way, is the other place to look for us.

KATHLEEN GYLLENHAAL: Yeah, we’ve been now a couple of months now been blogging every 1 or 2 weeks and going further into details about the science behind in utero and also kind of extrapolating where some of that information, you know, can take us when we look at politics or, you know, when we look at society. So, it’s an interesting forum as well to explore all of the stuff that In Utero brings up.

LISA REAGAN: And you can go to inuterofilm.com. Is that right?

KATHLEEN GYLLENHAAL: That’s right. Or the Facebook.com/inuterofilm

LISA REAGAN: Well, thank you all so much and I look forward to having house parties. I should mention that we do have a film discussion and study guide coming out through Kindredmedia.org and APPPAH and APPPAH is at birthpsychology.com because we want to help groups who want to delve deeply into the film to not only do so with some cheat sheets available for them, but to have resources and that will continue to add to the movement as it goes forward and we identify there are a lot of them out there now. We don’t want to leave people hanging, so we want you to see what’s available and then we look forward to following the Gyllenhaal’s as well in their posts and the movie bits that are coming forward. It’s very nice. So thank you both again.

KATHLEEN GYLLENHAAL: Thank you Lisa. It’s been a pleasure.

STEPHEN GYLLENHAAL: Thanks a lot.

WATCH THE TRAILER

The film is available for on demand viewing and purchase now. WATCH NOW.

]]>http://kindredmedia.org/2016/10/womb-ecology-becomes-world-ecology-utero-filmmakers-interview-new-demand-viewing-insights/feed/0Literacy And Bonding: Pam Leo On The New Book Fairy Pantry Projecthttp://kindredmedia.org/2016/09/literacy-bonding-pam-leo-new-book-fairy-pantry-project/
http://kindredmedia.org/2016/09/literacy-bonding-pam-leo-new-book-fairy-pantry-project/#respondThu, 22 Sep 2016 02:52:02 +0000http://kindredmedia.org/?p=19138Literacy And Bonding: Pam Leo On the New Book Fairy Pantry Project LISA REAGAN: Welcome to Kindred Media and Community. This is Lisa Reagan and today I am talking with Pam Leo, author of Connection Parenting and the founder of the new non-profit initiative, the Book Fairy Pantry Project. It is a grassroots local literacy […]

Literacy And Bonding: Pam Leo On the New Book Fairy Pantry Project

LISA REAGAN: Welcome to Kindred Media and Community. This is Lisa Reagan and today I am talking with Pam Leo, author of Connection Parenting and the founder of the new non-profit initiative, the Book Fairy Pantry Project. It is a grassroots local literacy movement with goals of increasing bonding between parents and children as well as literacy. So, welcome Pam.

PAM LEO: Hi.

LISA REAGAN: Tell us about the connection between Connection Parenting, which is a classic book, very well-loved by the conscious parenting movement, and what you’re doing now, what you’re bringing forward now.

PAM LEO: Well, since Connection Parenting is so much about connection and bonding, I realized recently how critical the literacy issue is in our country and the more that I learned about it, the more I could see a connection between parents bonding with their children through reading to their children and how important that is to their eventual literacy; so that just seemed like a natural path for me. I just got headed in that direction and the more I read, the more fascinated I became to head in that direction. And in fact, when I wrote Connection Parenting, I also recorded it as an audio book for two reasons: one because parents have so little time to read that I thought they can listen to it on their way to work or whatever. But the second and probably the most important of the two reasons is so that it would be accessible of all parents regardless of their level of literacy. I taught Connection Parenting in the prisons, in drug rehabilitation program with teen parents, with low income parent programs, and I knew that it was critical that it be available to them on audio regardless of their level of literacy that they would be able to access that information. So literacy has really kind of been a passion of mine for a pretty long time. It is not totally new for me.

LISA REAGAN: One of the things I love about the Book Fairy Pantry Project is how it works as a local grassroots movement here. But when you came out with Connection Parenting, I remember – I think it was 15 years ago you came to Virginia and we did a workshop together – but I remember people loved it because you do have that capacity to meet people where they are when they want to bond with their children and they want to connect with their children. Just for contextual sake, we want to always point out that advocating for conscious parenting in America is a tricky proposition because you come off sounding elitist, because we don’t have paid parental leave here and we don’t have in place social structures and community structures anymore that would foster parents bonding with their babies and families bonding in the way that other industrial countries, all of them, except for the US, get to do. Canada gets six months off and lots of European countries families get a year off paid and their jobs are not taken away from them just because they are having children. So this angle that you’re presenting here and the perspective that you bring is just crucial and I am so grateful for it.

Can you throw out just some of the statistics around literacy in America right now?

PAM LEO: Well, I honestly have to tell you that when I started researching family literacy, I was really dumbfounded at the statistics that one in four children will not learn to read. That was just unbelievable to me and that 2/3 of the 15.5 million children living in poverty do not have even one book in their home. I just thought this in unacceptable and we have to do something about this. I know there are a lot of family literacy organizations that are working very hard on this, but one more piece will help and that is the piece that I am bringing.

LISA REAGAN: I just can’t believe… those statistics are just stunning. They really are.

PAM LEO: They are. They really are.

LISA REAGAN: There is the functional literacy piece. What is that one again? A third?

PAM LEO: You know, I think one of the hardest things of developing this program for me has been trying to pin down literacy statistics because they all seem different. There does not see any agreement on it, but what I most commonly read is that 20% of the population is illiterate, meaning that they cannot read and write and that another 30% is functionally illiterate, meaning that they are reading below a 4th grade level if I remember that correctly, which comes up to about 50% of our country not being able to read and write on a level that helps them through the daily functions that the people who can read do everyday. That keeps them from having a better job, from having income. It just really, I cannot believe that in our country that the numbers were that high.

LISA REAGAN: Yeah, that is amazing, amazingly shocking. So tell me a little bit about reading to babies and what is happening there. I know there is a lot of neuroscience going on and why is it so important? How is it that this is lasting a lifetime?

PAM LEO: Well, it really is kind of a new idea to a lot of people. That, oh, a lot of parents think about reading to children, oh, when they’re walking and talking and they don’t really think about it when they’re that young. I mean, when you bring home a new baby, I mean, some parents do actually read to their baby in the womb and there is research about that too and how they will recognize those stories when they’re born, but just beginning to read to them. What I tell parents, you know for the first few months, you can read your own books to them, it isn’t the content that matters to them, it is being held, it is hearing your voice, and reading language is so different than spoken language. They kind of imprint on the written language by reading aloud to them.

So you could read them children’s books, but like I said, for the first few months until you’re really showing them the pictures and that sort of thing, you could just catch up on your own reading and read the newspaper or a magazine or your book just while holding them and what they begin to associate with reading is the comfort and the warmth and the connection that they feel while that’s happening. So it’s pretty important both to bonding and to increasing their ability to learn to learn to read. So it really is twofold, that time we spend doing that.

LISA REAGAN: So tell me what is unique about the Book Fairy Pantry Project? Because literacy is hot and it is a big recognized public issue out there, but your idea for how to address at risk populations is so beautiful and I love the book fairy, by the way. Everyone needs to go to www.bookfairypantryproject.com and just gaze upon the book fairy, she is beautiful. The website is beautiful.

PAM LEO: Thank you, I love her. Well, I think the thing that really sets it apart is every program that I know of, the focus is getting books into the hands of children, which is so critical and so important because we know that when children get to pick out their own books they read more. But as a companion to that, one of the things I felt a message that I got again and again over the many years that I worked with parents that are struggling is that while they so appreciate everything that anyone else does for their children, they desperately want to do for their own children. Not that they don’t want other people to give their children books, they do, but they would love to give their children books.

So, by being able to go to the food pantry that they’re going to go to get food anyway, they get to pick them out. If they don’t have an income that they can go to bookstores and have the luxury of buying brand new books for their children, they are probably not very often getting the opportunity to be the one who picks that book for their child and I know that in the same way that children read more when they get to pick out their own books, parents are more invested in reading the books that they pick out for their children than ones that just come home with their children from school or from the library or whatever, that they really had nothing to do with. So the mission really of the pantry project is for all parents to have books to read to their children so that all children will get to learn to read and that there will not be any child in this country or in the world I hope that does not own a book. There is no reason for it to happen. There is no shortage of gently used or new donated books that can be made available to children and when parents get to be the ones that provide that, I think it is going to be yet another piece of the puzzle of getting books into the home.

What I say to parents when I talk to them about it, I say, imagine these two children, or one child started to being read to from birth and was read to daily from birth until they went to school and now imagine another child who has hardly been read to, maybe they got read to at daycare or nursery school or whatever, Headstart, so they arrive at school with maybe 25 hours of having been read to compared to this other child who has thousands of hours of turning pages in books and all of that experience, that is not a level playing field. The child who hasn’t had the opportunity to learn to read is never going to catch up and there is so much information that I read about how they just don’t catch up and so we have this opportunity from the moment a child is born to provide a literacy environment and to make it so that they have the things that they need that when they get to school that they have the things that they will be ready to learn to read.

So, I really like the idea of learning to learn to read. That’s about how do books work and turning pages and is it upside down and all of those things are in place when there are books in the home. If we can just get the books in the home, the books will do the job. Once the books are there, children start looking at them and I am also very excited. I only recently learned and I think it has actually been around for a long time, but it was new to me about dialogic reading, which can sound like kind of a clinical name for something that a lot of parents already do. It is based really on the word dialog of having a dialog with the child about a book. So there are many parents, who, for a number of reasons, I know of a parent who has a traumatic brain injury and she was unable to read to her granddaughter. There might be a parent who is illiterate. There might be a parent who does not read English and so they do not have any books in their native language. So there are a number of reasons why adults might not be able to read to a child. So what excited me so much about this concept of having a dialog about a picture book is that is does level the playing field and all adults can read to all children with this method of sharing stories. So I kind of refer to dialogic reading as just sharing stories. It is a little less intimidating term.

It is very exciting to me that no matter what the situation is for that adult, they can sit down with a picture book with a young child and have the child turn the pages and talk with the child about those pictures on the pages and that child is going to be getting all of the benefits that they would be getting even if they were traditionally reading it word by word all the way through. So doing that with children can either be in addition to traditionally reading and that just enriches it or that can be instead of traditionally reading to them. So that’s another part of the project that I really want to promote to parents that this is an option that can really increase the connection and the bonding because the more dialog the parent and child has about that book and the pictures on the page, it is going to strengthen their connection, but it is also going to strengthen their learning how to learn to read. So I think that is so exciting, which I wouldn’t have discovered if I wasn’t doing this project.

LISA REAGAN: Well, just your approach is very holistic, because you’re looking at literacy now on so many different levels and I know you had shared with me that you are inspired by Paul Hawken, who wrote Blessed Unrest.

PAM LEO: That was a totally new concept for me. I listen to audio books a lot. I am a major fan of audio books and his, just, I saw it, I was looking for books and I saw it and it just spoke to me and I bought it. I have been listening to it really the whole time I have been developing this project, just listening to it over and over.

Solving for Pattern, Wendell Berry actually coined that phrase. It is about finding a solution that just doesn’t fix one problem that it addresses many aspects of that situation. So if you look at illiteracy as the problem and that it is caused by the lack of books in children’s homes. So you would think, okay, so we solve the problem by putting donated books into the food pantries where parents can get them and now there will be books in the home. But that is only a small part of it. So far, I have identified ten areas. It is a solution to ten other things besides just getting books into the home. Do you want to hear about that?

LISA REAGAN: Yes!

PAM LEO: Okay. The first one is the obvious is that is solves the lack of children’s books in low income homes by using an existing infrastructure. The food pantries are already there. They exist in every city in town. We are not creating something new here. We are connecting to something that already exists.

Because it already exists, the second benefit is that parents will be able to get these books for their children not by going someplace new or separate or different. They can get them at a place that they are already familiar and comfortable with going, so that is definitely a second benefit.

Third, it also recycles unneeded books. The plan for the Book Fairy Pantry Project is that donated books largely will come from having donation boxes set up in the schools, churches, library, anywhere in the community that is willing to have a donation box in their premises, nut largely from the schools, so children are actually going to be able to help other children by donating the books they’ve already read or have outgrown and so that concept of children helping children really appeals to me and it gives them a strong message about how important reading is if we’re doing all of this to get books to children who wouldn’t otherwise have any.

The fourth one is parents being the ones who get to pick out the books. I just see that as just an important aspect of the project that they will be so much more invested in reading the books because they picked them out. I just have this vision of a parent being there getting their food and then they get to see the books and saying okay, I’m going to get a board book for the baby and Johnny loves dinosaurs, so I am going to get him this dinosaur picture book and Sally is really into fairies so I am going to get her this chapter book. So just going home excited to be the one who brings these things to their children. So I just really get excited when I think about that. The fact that books and food are going to be together in the same facility really elevates books to the importance of food and shelter. So I think there is a really big message in that.

I think the idea of getting the dialogic reading or story sharing information out there, like I want to have handouts that go home with the books so that, you know, maybe grandma lives with them or grandpa, or aunt or uncle, who is in that position, where they normally aren’t the ones who are reading to the children suddenly find out that they can share stories with these children and there is yet another adult who is going to bond with them and connect with them through these books that are coming into the home. So I just see that as one of the really important benefits. So by getting the books into the home, one of the things I read repeatedly on all of the literacy websites is that children need a print rich environment, which essentially translates into lots of books into the home. Actually, not even just books. One of the things that I think is happening today because we do so much on screen, a lot of people do not even have paper calendars around anymore. They do not necessarily even have the newspaper or magazines, so there really is a lack of print material, not even just children’s books, but print material in the home, so we can consciously try to expand on that and make sure there is a print rich environment with children’s books and parent’s books so that children see their parents reading as well, so there is a lot that will accomplish by getting those books into the home.

Also, one of the things that I love about this project is the people who will benefit from this project, the parents and the children, can get to be part of delivering the project. They can volunteer to deliver books. They can be part of this so it ends up being a hand up instead of a hand out. I think that’s really important to everyone’s dignity. The ninth point that I really love too is that it creates opportunities for volunteers to have really meaningful work literally from children to elders that children can make posters in their schools to donate books and decorate the donation boxes and elders can go into the food pantry and clean the books with baby wipes and help sort them out, so there are so many ways that people can do really meaningful volunteer things on this project.

Then the tenth one, which is one of my very favorite ones, is that when food pantries also become book pantries even the poorest among us can leave our children a legacy of literacy. This will really address the issue. Illiteracy is a disease of poverty and the way out of poverty is literacy. The currency of literacy is children’s books. It really comes back around to that. I just get excited at the idea that children can make a huge impact on solving the illiteracy problem by donating their books to other children. I just think that’s a major win all the way around. That’s my ten points so far. I know there is going to be more.

LISA REAGAN: Again, the whole idea of Solving for Pattern, so you are going at this for this multi-level thinking is just rich and wonderful. I just love it. So tell us a little bit about what you can find on the website to get you going.

PAM LEO: You can find all of the steps that it can take. There is a getting started page on the website and it literally walks you through what would be the process. I mean, just to give you a brief jist, when someone hears about it, they can go to their local food pantry, there is a sheet that they can download and print out and take with them so they can have something in hand to present to them that really lays it all out to them and essentially say to them I would really like our food pantry to also be a book pantry and if I line up all of the volunteers to make this happen, are you willing to have the books here and are you willing to have your staff interface with the book fairy volunteers to make this happen? We will clean them. We will shelve them. We will table them, or whatever means they have to display them and then you go to your local schools, your library, your churches, and it is really one of those situations where one really ambitious volunteer in a very small town can probably do the whole project or in a bigger situation, she or he could enroll a volunteer for every job. Someone who picks up the books, someone who cleans the books, you know, people who talk with the schools.

There can be lots of volunteers or very few. One of the things that I really emphasize is that it will be every food pantries own project. On the website, I am putting book fairy standards, which they can go by or not. It really will be their project. We are asking that food pantries who do participate to register with us because at some point as more and more people register, we want to have a registry, so if you live in this town, you can go on the website and say, oh, is there one of these on my town, in my state, wherever I live and so if they are registered, then it will be there. There is a $5 registration fee, 100% of which will go to the feed the children program, which I really loved because it sort of makes it full circle that food pantries help the book pantries by housing the books and making them available and then the book pantries gets to turn around help feed the children, so we are really hand in hand all the way around on it. So I think that this is a project in process.

This is a very important thing I want people to know. We really want to hear from people. What is working well for you, what is challenging you. Share your tips with us. I am just sort of putting the idea out there and it is going to be a team effort to bring it to fruition and to make this really go and really happen and that five years from now, maybe that we can find out that babies that were born this year had such a more print rich environment because their parents were able to get books either at the WIC program, which we will also be donating books to, or their parents got books at the food pantry, and they did grow up with books in their home, as opposed to if those books weren’t available there that they might grow up without books available in their home. So I think that we really will see a difference in as little as 5 years.

LISA REAGAN: Well, the reception in Maine has been tremendous. People are very excited about it.

PAM LEO: They are. It is so exciting to me. I have just never felt so welcome. They love the idea. They can’t wait to have the books start coming in and be able to give them out, so that’s really been encouraging to me. There’s a saying, I don’t know if it is just in Maine, or if it is known nationally, as Maine goes, so goes the nation. So I am hoping, I want it to be in every food pantry in Maine and then go across the country and then around the world, because we have what we need to solve this illiteracy problem. We really do. We have all of the pieces. We just need to do it and act on it and we can do it.

LISA REAGAN: So I am so thrilled with not just the work but what you have brought and people can go to Kindredmedia.org and read your poetry there. They can also read your articles about parenting, but the book fairy has really inspired you to come up with some beautiful poetry. I am wondering if you would read a “Book Fairy Tale” to us that you wrote to give us some inspiration for our call?

PAM LEO: I can totally do that. It’s funny because I do have “Please Read To Me” memorized, but I haven’t memorized the “Book Fairy Tale”. What I’ll do here is pull out my iPad here and read it right off the site here that is under construction and let me get it right here. Thank you, I love the opportunity to share this because it is just sweet. So, the “Book Fairy Tale” is: Wee fairies each have jobs to do. The Book Fairy’s job is to get books to you, and to all the world’s children, not just a few. Books are very heavy, even ones that are quite small. A wee fairy cannot carry them, ’cause she is only five inches tall! The Book Fairy needs “helpers”, grown ups short and tall, to get books to children who love them. And to children who have none at all. The Book Fairy really needs you. The children need you too. If there are to be books for every child, we have a big job to do. Don’t disappoint the fairies, that would never do. If all the children are to learn to read, it’s up to me and you.

LISA REAGAN: I do love that. I do love “Please Read Me” also. This is from the fairies point of view. The please read to me, poem, which is longer, is from the child’s point of view from the parent. I should tell everyone what I’m looking at on the website is your amazingly adorable picture of you as a one-year-old child. This is just how sweet. I just love this photo of you. How beautiful.

PAM LEO: I think it is one of my only baby pictures. I mean, I am 66 and back then we didn’t do a lot with photography so it is kind of one of my treasures and I thought, no one wants to see a picture of an older lady, let’s just see a sweet little girl, so there we are. The poem underneath it is so sweet. It is anonymous or unknown. I found it when I was looking at quotes and quotes are my passion and I just thought that was such a sweet little thing that someone write and how sweet to have every child end their day that way. So thanks, yeah.

LISA REAGAN: This is the one that says read me a story, tuck me in tight, tell me you love me and kiss me goodnight.

PAM LEO: That’s the one.

LISA REAGAN: Well, Pam, I am just so thrilled to be able to talk to you and work with you again and I am so very excited about all of the support that is coming forward for the book fairy pantry project and I hope everyone will go to www.bookfairypantryproject.com. There is a newsletter sign up so that you can stay in touch with what is happening. This does not cost. It is not a membership program or anything. You can email Pam and ask her questions through the site as well. So there is anything else you would like to say?

PAM LEO: I want to say to you, Lisa. Yes, I would like to say that I am thrilled to be in an initiative of Families for Conscious Living because it so validates the fact that you took my project on as an initiative so validates the half of literacy that is about bonding. That is so thrilling for me.

LISA REAGAN: This is a creative way to facilitate bonding in a country that does not support parents in doing that.

PAM LEO: Right.

LISA REAGAN: It just moves my heart to be able to offer this to parents and families. It is a hard culture to bring children into. We don’t realize what we are missing. I have so many people who tell me this all of the time. Kathy Kendall-Tackett, she’s a breastfeeding expert. She is a very very popular speaker. We have a video of her on Kindred of her talking about how parents are pressured to do this in our country, but we don’t realize we don’t have what we really need.

PAM LEO: We don’t support them to do it.

LISA REAGAN: We don’t support them to do it. So it is a cultural problem.

PAM LEO: We say this is the best thing to do, but good luck trying to do it.

LISA REAGAN: Good luck trying to do it and keep your job and keep food in your house and ….

PAM LEO: But reading, we can do that part of bonding, we really can do that part.

LISA REAGAN: We can do that part.

PAM LEO: Books everywhere. In the car. That’s what I love about “Please Read to Me”. That’s one of the things that I hope parents will really take to heart that parents will really take to heart is just everywhere, everywhere, books, books, books, everywhere. I know one little girl who takes one of her favorite books to bed to her instead of a stuffy. That’s how precious her books are to her. It’s so sweet.

LISA REAGAN: Oh I feel with that little girl. I still am I’m sure. I still have piles of books around my bed.

PAM LEO: I do too. I never thought about it that way. It’s really true. That’s the way a lot of mine are.

LISA REAGAN: Well, thank you so much again, Pam, and I am looking forward to following the Book Fairy and what is that she says to everyone?

PAM LEO: Fly with you?

LISA REAGAN: Come fly with me! Isn’t that it?

PAM LEO: No, fly with you. They don’t say… fairies never say hello or goodbye, they always say fly with you. The other person that I really want to acknowledge too who was a huge inspiration to me this summer as I was developing this program is Gail Carson Levine. I, all summer, in addition to listening to Paul Hawken, was listening to her quest books, which almost everything I learned about fairies I learned from Gail Carson Levine and her audiobooks and her quest for neverland, the quest for the egg, the quest for the wand, those were the three audiobooks that were my entertainment all summer, so she is really the fairy person that I learned from.

LISA REAGAN: Okay, so she formed the fairy in your head that came through as the Book Fairy.

PAM LEO: Yeah, I was really influenced by her. Yes, one of the things in the Book Fairy is that all fairies have jobs, is like Tinkerbell. She is a tinker. She fixes pots and pans and I just got this idea, you know, well, there is the toothfairy and she has her job, well, the Book Fairy has a job, and that’s to get books to children, you know, they’re five inches tall according to Gail Carson Levine, how can they possibly deliver books, they need grown up helpers, and in the areas where the Book Fairy has lots of grown up helpers, children have lots of books. In the areas where the Book Fairy does not have lots of grown up helpers, children do not have lots of books, so we need a lot of Book Fairy helpers to help the Book Fairy make sure that all children have books. That’s her job but we can only do it if we help her.

LISA REAGAN: If it goes as Maine is going right now, you are going to have a lot of helpers showing up.

]]>http://kindredmedia.org/2016/09/literacy-bonding-pam-leo-new-book-fairy-pantry-project/feed/0Birthing While Black – An Interview With Jennie Joseph, Midwife And Doulahttp://kindredmedia.org/2016/07/birthing-black-interview-jennie-joseph-midwife-doula/
http://kindredmedia.org/2016/07/birthing-black-interview-jennie-joseph-midwife-doula/#respondSat, 09 Jul 2016 21:17:17 +0000http://kindredmedia.org/?p=18932Please join Denise Bolds – Bold Doula – and her special guest Jennie Joseph, Executive Director at Commonsense Childbirth, a 501(c)(3) as our discussion of birthing while black continues. Jennie is a midwife and initiator of the National Perinatal Task Force. Denise Bolds, a certified birth doula in New York and MSW is the producer and host of Black […]

Please join Denise Bolds – Bold Doula – and her special guest Jennie Joseph, Executive Director at Commonsense Childbirth, a 501(c)(3) as our discussion of birthing while black continues. Jennie is a midwife and initiator of the National Perinatal Task Force. Denise Bolds, a certified birth doula in New York and MSW is the producer and host of Black Motherhood Empowerment. Denise is also a National Perinatal Task Force Ambassador.

Jennie believes in women! Her personal mission is to be the NEW approach to women’s wellness by providing inspiration, education, empowerment and support as a means to optimal health and by ensuring that all women have healthcare answers that they can understand. Jennie’s work reflects her years of experience in the field of midwifery, maternal child health, social justice and public health spanning two continents and three decades.

]]>http://kindredmedia.org/2016/07/birthing-black-interview-jennie-joseph-midwife-doula/feed/0The Wise Parent Study – Interview With University of Wisconsin Researcherhttp://kindredmedia.org/2016/03/the-wise-parent-study-interview-with-university-of-wisconsin-researcher/
http://kindredmedia.org/2016/03/the-wise-parent-study-interview-with-university-of-wisconsin-researcher/#respondTue, 29 Mar 2016 17:49:31 +0000http://kindredmedia.org/?p=17853The first study of its kind, The Wise Parent Study out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and its research insights were pioneered by David Metler, Kindred’s Contributing Editor and Families for Conscious Living board member. As Metler shares in this interview, wisdom is currently being researched at UW-Madison as a thoughtful, deliberate and ethical process […]

The first study of its kind, The Wise Parent Study out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and its research insights were pioneered by David Metler, Kindred’s Contributing Editor and Families for Conscious Living board member. As Metler shares in this interview, wisdom is currently being researched at UW-Madison as a thoughtful, deliberate and ethical process for problem solving, judgment, and decision making in uncertain and difficult situations. Whereas most of the existing research on practical wisdom has focused on conceptual models of how individuals approach larger existential life challenges, practical wisdom may be particularly useful in a specific domain of life and expertise, such as parenting. The Wise Parenting Study was designed to explore not just what parents think but how they think through their solutions to parenting dilemmas that have no perfect or simple solution.

In this interview, Lisa Reagan, Kindred’s editor, talks with David Metler, MS, about the study’s findings and how these insights support conscious parenting.

Read the article and overview on the study, including exercises, from Metler here.

If you are interested in participating in further study on Wise Parenting with Metler, join a closed Facebook discussion group on The Wise Parent Study here.

LISA REAGAN: So today I want to talk to you about The Wise Parent Study,which is the first study of it’s kind and I am just going to let you take us in because I am so excited about the grounded insights that have come out of it and how it helps us to shift further and deeper into this New Story and holistic understanding of what we’re trying to articulate and maybe intend when we say we want to parent consciously. What is that? So, thank you for this awesome study and tell us about it.

DAVE METLER: Sure. I do think a lot of the Old Story is really focused on control and having the right answer and with the research I just completed, we actually took a very different approach and we’re trying to find the New Story in parenting. I think that the new story is really centered around practical wisdom.

Practical wisdom in parenting specifically is a very useful set of skills and processes that parents are equipped with and every parent has at least some background in and can improve in various ways on these types of practices and that they’re very helpful in dealing with a lot of the uncertainty and ambiguity that parents face daily. I think that it is actually quite liberating and maybe terrifying at the beginning. I think that is part of the Heroes Journey is just embracing how terrifying it is to be truly present and to just welcome some of the uncertainty and unrehearsed adventure of parenting.

Because just like anything in life and parenting is one of the most emotional relationships and the most special and beautiful relationships we could have and I do think our study was really focused on seeing the ways in which parents try and approach dilemmas, situations in which there really are not right answers. These types of situations actually come up quite often.

So what we did is focus in on parents of teenagers and trying to see what are the major dilemmas that parents are facing with teenagers. We actually found that they’re numerous and they’re pretty diverse and they happen quite regularly. This is not once a year, some parents are experiencing these daily or multiple times a day. Dilemmas in which books or manuals or websites, sources of advice, really don’t have and really could not have the right answer because what parents are facing are very complex dependent challenges.

So each parent is going to actually have, you know, the best solution within themselves, but also drawing upon possibly their partner or extended family or even other experts or people that they would rely on. I think that truly is the ecology of the child. Parents are not in this alone. Although I do think that the empowering thing is that parents are really the experts. They are the wisest in relating with their child because most parents spend the most time with their children more than anyone else in their child’s life and a lot of wisdom is based on socioemotional knowledge and it is very relational. Knowing your child so that you can make the right decision around some type of dilemma within the moment or taking the time to work through to find the best solution for everyone in a situation.

So what our study did is we actually interviewed parents of teenagers and we ran them through a couple of hypothetical scenarios that across a varied range of dilemmas. One of them is around rules. You know, a teen having a curfew and whether or not the parent would break the rule given the different contextual particulars of their situation and it has been said that practical wisdom is knowing when to break the rule. All rules over time in parenting become negotiable in some way and that’s something that parents of teenagers especially, especially those of late teenagers are really trying to figure out is when to negotiate these rules as their kids become adults.

Secondly, we looked at interpersonal challenges around let’s say that a teenager has a challenge with a friend confiding with them, but they don’t know what to do and a parent has to figure out how to navigate that. Finally, we had a dilemma around religion. You know, the teenager decided that they wanted to practice a different religion than their parents and how would a parent work through that type of situation. So after this part, we had parents talk about dilemmas that they had currently faced and the ways in which they worked through them and reflect on some of the things they wished they had done differently and also some of the things they felt like they did in a very wise way.

What our study did since it was the first study on practical wisdom in the realm of parenting is that there was a grounded theory approach. We had to work from the ground up to try and figure out what parents actually are doing. What are their heuristics? What are their thinking processes? How do they work through these types of challenges? What emerged are nine dimensions of what we are calling practical wisdom. This is very exciting because it really extends on what has been previously done especially in this field since there really has not been any research behind practical wisdom, although it has been a very popular term. I think it is something that is going to lead to even further work that can solidify further ways in which these types of parenting processes, these nine dimensions look like in action with these groups of parents and across different cultures to further understand what practical wisdom actually looks like and also give parents some ideas for practice so that they could become just more equipped with tools to face the uncertain and ambiguous challenges that they are facing with children.

LISA REAGAN: Okay. Wow.

DAVE METLER: Okay.

LISA REAGAN: Let me ask you to do a couple of things.

DAVE METLER: Okay.

LISA REAGAN: I want to just make sure everybody is keeping up with the terminology. So, first of all, you are doing this out of the human ecology department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. So can you take a moment and tell us about human ecology and what is the ecology of the child as you have talked about in your writing have to do with this? What I want to do is to help our listeners just how far into frontier territory we are going here. If anybody feels like I do after talking with you and reading with this study, I feel relieved and I can feel these little tender hooks of the taboo around dominator, authoritarian model of parenting that is the modern way of parenting style now, loses its grip on us and the guilt tripping and the ability to hold guilt in yourself starts to dissipate. There are reasons for that. It is because we are leaving behind a paradigm consciously now and moving into this space with you and with this language and so I just want to take a moment and talk about the language, especially human ecology, the ecology of the child, and then of course practical wisdom.

DAVE METLER: Sure. Yeah, I think it is great to clarify because I am conscious of how wordy the academic world can get and I want to make sure with things like this around practical wisdom are pretty cutting edge that there is a common understanding. So I think it is really very wise to look for some of the lingo so that we can continue working together and figure out what’s coming next in this. So the school of human ecology, I will try to keep this short but succinct. It started in 1903 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as the school of home economics.

So the idea was really trying to prepare women to be social change agents in their families and communities. So the school is very unique, because it has four different departments within it, consisting of human development and family studies, design studies, consumer sciences, and then civil society and community research. So all of them really connect to the family and the community are the core arenas so to speak of social change and social justice work and also beginning as a school with very feminist roots. The human ecology perspective is very based on relationships and relationship building as the greatest indicator of social change is just the strength of relationships within families and within their larger context.

So human ecology began and it is framed around ecological system’s theory because if anyone was interested they could research Urie Bronfenbrenner, who is really the founder of this ecological systems theory and I think that the model looks at the way in which humans have bidirectional relationships with their larger ecology. So I think it is really important to understand bidirectional relationships so that not only do we have an impact on our larger environment, on our families, on our communities, on schools, on neighborhoods, on the larger culture that we are embedded within and societal institutions and structures, but also those have an effect on every individual.

So this relational approach to understanding systems thinking is really I think a wisdom approach in itself. It is trying to understand not just the way that other traditions are silhouetted like psychology is very focused on individuals or sociology is very focused on the macro, seeing the large picture. Human ecology actually synthesizes a number of fields that have existed for centuries and tries to really look at ecological systems and the ways in which change within one aspect of the system effects another aspect of the system. I do think that you said that this is a way that we can think about whole living systems that actually should be relieving in many ways and empowering for parents because I think that the understanding that I have gained here at the school is around the ecology of the child, that it does take an ecology to raise a child and I think that a lot of current narrative is around parents.

The pressure is on parents. If parents mess up their children, then they should feel guilty and it’s all the parents fault. I think there are ways in which parents are responsible and have a huge impact on their children, but I do think that it is important to keep in mind all of the other factors and parts of the context that are going to impact the child including media is considered to be the third parent these days. Ways in which societal institutions, our culture, grandparents, the child’s peers, things even on a genetic level like epigenetics. There are ways in which children are being affected, I guess the APPPAH phrase is that “Womb ecology becomes world ecology.” There are ways in which children are embedded within a much larger social political context and parents are a significant part of that context, but it’s important to keep in mind that there are a number of other key stakeholders within the ecology of a child.

I do think that parents from hearing that might feel a mix of emotions because it really is something that I think with time will especially feel quite relieving. There is an impact that parents have, but also there are a lot of things that are somewhat out of their control and in dealing with that uncertainty of things that are out of your control, I think that it actually is a call for parents to come together and not just parents in the more traditional sense, but I define parent as anyone who is raising children. I think that includes everybody, at least in indirect ways. But also, thinking of the environment as a parent and you could get into that. I think that it is really trying to understand this larger systems thinking and seeing the ecology around the child and not just one piece of the ecology.

LISA REAGAN: Yes, that is very relieving and I know Darcia Narvaez’s work out of Notre Dame in more specific terms of biological imperatives of the child in order to meet their neurodevelopmental needs is to have this village around them that helps to care for the child and makes sure that parents and mothers are not desperately burned out and at clinical risk of depression like they are in the United States where we don’t have any parental leave, of course. So, tell us what you’ve found in these nine leaves coming out of this wisdom tree that’s on the page if you go to Kindredmedia.org, you can read samples from this study and interviews with some of the parents and more about it. So, tell us about these nine components.

DAVE METLER: Sure. Well, we did some qualitative and quantitative analysis. So there are great examples within the article of the some of the exemplars of ways that parents responded. I just want to remind everyone who is listening that nobody had a perfect score and no one had no score. So I think one of the major take aways is that wisdom is present in everyone in different degrees and in different contexts, and I think that is really hopeful.

What we have found are nine dimensions of practical wisdom and these dimensions are things that can be practiced and improved upon. So very quickly, I think it is important, and it is in the article, but to have a really simple definition of practical wisdom and to make sure to differentiate it from the many other types of wisdom and ways in which that it can be defined. I think for our purposes and the way that we research practical wisdom was based on Aristotle’s understanding of phronesis, which is really trying to find, in the simplest way, the right thing to do in the right way with the right means. This is something that will change by the moment. In one moment, this might be the right thing and a day later, a lot of things have changed. It is really something that is embracing of the adventure of parenting in that there is no path not even in the same day will you have the same response to some challenge or thing that comes up.

The nine dimensions though include things that I think are pretty common, things like reflection and mindfulness I feel like have gotten a lot of attention and just having parents thinking about their parenting and thinking about things that they want to change or things that are going well and being able to reflect on that with some other person that they trust is really important because I think there is always blind spots and ways in which it is important to have feedback from someone other than yourself and then mindfulness is something that has really been focused on I think in the popular media as a significant parenting practice of being present with your children and being able to be… the skill of awareness of your own awareness is the way I understand it and being able to really focus in your attention on what you want to.

So you have control of your attention and a couple of other categories, purpose identification is really about parents being able to understand their larger purpose within the moment that they are handling some type of challenge. So a lot of parents who answered in a less wise way would have lower purposes, possibly more self serving purposes and maybe they just felt good grounding their child or punishing their child. But their longer term purpose I think would be something and a wiser response would be something that would be more in line with their child development towards the person that they want to become.

Some of the ways that parents have to make decisions is sometimes in the moment and sometimes they have time to reflect a little bit longer, but trying to keep in mind that this is a young person that is someday going to be a bit more independent and need to be able to face these challenges, face their own challenges, so how do you actually prepare them for adulthood in some ways. Another thing was perspective taking, really understanding the child’s perspective but also the perspectives of others involved in whatever the scenario is. Problem framing is another dimension.

Being able to understand that sometimes how a challenge initially appears is not necessarily the actual problem and so some of the wiser responses really did some searching. It was more problem finding then it was problem solving and I think that is a really radical thing in our problem solving culture. A couple of the other categories quickly are around social and emotional knowledge. This is what I was talking about before about parents really being the experts and maybe their teachers and their other caregivers as well, but really having this relational knowledge, but I do think that having that book and manuals will fall short of knowing your child. They know things more in general, which can be useful and that’s the next category, parenting knowledge and skills. Sometimes it is helpful to know the research of what is regular for teenagers.

You know, I think there is some knowledge around things like puberty that are important to know or rebellion, that teenagers might not be trying to put you down personally when you don’t want to practice your religion, they might just be rebelling and trying to find their own voice and their own views and so it is really knowledge of child and adolescent development and some of the skills of being able to have a dialog with your children, being able to have the skills of active listening and skills of just getting feedback from your children. I think that is very hard and parents can get really defensive.

Finally, compassion for yourself and also for your child. I think this is parents being able to deal with these challenges not with anger, maybe initially anger, but being able to be reflective and find a way to work through these situations with love and with respect. Lastly and I think most importantly and I think this is one of the most ground breaking parts of the study is trying to understand integrative thinking and the way that all of these dimensions are actually balanced and are weighed in a particular situation because I think as individual dimensions, they are helpful, but in reality parents are weighing different perspectives, they are trying to understand the actual purpose. They are using mindfulness as a skill. They are using parenting skills and knowledge. They are using their socioemotional knowledge. All of these are kind of intertwining in some kind of dance. Then, parents have to come up with some kind of solution. So how do they do that? That is really what the final dimension is about is how do parents integrate all of these, you could say, pieces of the picture and come to type of solution that is the best for them in that situation.

LISA REAGAN: I just want to reiterate that these components or dimensions, as your calling them, of practical wisdom in parenting are not coming out of a place of “this is what we recommend” like you would normally see in a parenting magazine. “This is how you should parent.” This was an observation. These are observations through research that you have been able to tweeze out now so parents like myself who have no idea what I’m doing can look at this and go, oh, okay, I was probably doing some of these things here and employing this perspective taking. It has given me language, by the way, that applying to parenting is definitely coming out of, again, a new story. There was just the relationship of the child and maybe we should talk about this a little bit, but this approach, this wise parenting approach seems to be based on a lot of trust.

DAVE METLER: It is true. I do think that there is a great quote and social change happens at the speed of trust and I think you’re right, Lisa. I wanted to highlight what you said in that this is very different then what I feel like is the old story. There are right answers and they are in the experts. They are not in the parents. You need to find an expert and they will tell you what to do. You know, find whatever is the most common parenting manual or book of your time and follow exactly what they say. I think what practical wisdom is trying to do is make visible what parents are already doing. It is actually just highlighting the wisdom that parents have and I think as you highlight that wisdom, parents not only become aware of their own processes and the way that they deal with challenges and the way that they just deal with everyday life with their children, but they also can figure out ways in which they could practice and become better in these types of processes.

So I think that is a really huge difference between the way in which a lot of things which are geared towards parents are packaged in that this next book or this next workbook is the answer that you’ve been looking for and I think that one of the really significant things about practical wisdom is that it really is this reorienting to trusting yourself. I think parents trusting themselves, but also trusting their larger ecology and I do think that is a work in progress. It doesn’t just happen. I do think that trust is something that will effect children and children who are trusted by their parents or by their teachers or by anyone within their ecology, it is something that is really magical to be trusted by adults when you’re a child is kind of at the core of anything that would be furthering social change.

LISA REAGAN: Well, thank you for that wonderful entry into the next questions, which is to help us to draw the lines between where we are, talking about parenting and our one on one relationship with our child and then what you do also study, which is the relationship between practical wisdom and social justice. So how did this come out into our world, this approach?

DAVE METLER: Yeah, I think, I really I love this question because it is a chance for me to really improvise because this is at the edge of my own fascination and where I see things heading is the intersection around practical wisdom and social justice and well being. I think those three are synthesizing. I think that one of my favorite quotes that I will start with is by Cornell West is “Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public.” I love it because it really re-centers social justice around love and love being the core of social justice and I think that is in line a lot of ways in which people throughout time have approached social justice in ways that have been the most successful.

I think what connects love with social justice is actually what Kindred has been talking about with the new story is this relationship between present mindfulness being a practice that will lead to more presence and then as you become more present, I think that there is opportunity for more genuine connection and as you have more genuine connection and you have more genuine presence, I feel like that is love. That is at least a huge component of love is connection and actually being present with somebody. I think for parents this is really hard to do. I think that parents, every one in this study and every one that I’ve ever met loves their children. It’s just a universal. But I think what’s hard is a lot of parents are either in the future or they are in the past. So parents who are in the future are worried. They are anxious. The future is uncertain. They are actually doing a lot of their parenting out of fear.

Then parents who are in the past are really sometimes stuck within the maladaptive patterns from their own childhood and are parenting from a place of fear and possibly insecurity or any number of unconscious patterns that they have picked up themselves. So I think it is very rare that there are these moments and possibly days maybe for longer periods of time than that where parents are truly present in the present moment with their children, where they feel that amazing moment of being connected and where they feel that it’s love in everyday moments. I think that’s the real connection to social justice is that I think parenting is a very political act and I think it’s a very significant act and I do think it is one of the most powerful ways in which people will effect the larger world is the decisions that they make around parenting and the way that they treat their children.

I see that connection very strongly in some of the dimensions of practical wisdom of parents being able to, the beginning of anything with practical wisdom is actually discernment of just perceiving that a situation requires more than an automatic or quick response. Because all of these dimensions are very conscious and intentional and I think that most of life, you know, just like brushing your teeth can become really automatic or habitual over time. So to become present in a new moment, so to speak, is the new story. I think that’s where we have our greatest opportunity for connection, for love, and to further social justice.

LISA REAGAN: Well, I love that you’re able to draw the relationship piece out into the world and make it practical again. It is a practical grounded part. I shouldn’t say that parenting is a heroes journey that we are referring to, the listener can go to parentingasaheroesjourney.com and there are a number of authors and presenters there exploring this no path parenting process and how to orient yourself and understand that you are operating between stories and this has all new language and by the way, Dave, I am now recruiting you to present this year. You’ll see Dave there. You’ll see him there. But in the mean time, at the bottom of your article on Kindred, there are exercises that people can go through and they are designed with each of the nine dimensions with practical wellness in mind.

DAVE METLER: Sure, well, practical well-being. I think one of the most incredible things I have been learning this year with this whole human ecology, I think really most of my adult life I think I’ve been trying to figure out how to maximize I guess my impact on the world and also to balance that with taking care of myself as well. I think that what I’ve found is that it’s really important to understand how to make progress towards very lofty and large possibly idealistic goals like transforming childhood or working towards social justice. How to make progress towards those in everyday moments. How do we spend our time everyday and I think one of the most important things we can do is we can build habits. We can build practices slowly over time that will further our practice wisdom abilities but just our ability to experience our lives more fully in our connection and in our larger purpose.

So the end of the article presents some exercises for practice. The exercises at the end of the article I think could be very useful to parents if they want to find a way to practice. So this isn’t just another article that you read. It has some ideas for practice and I think that there could be some more ideas as well for practicing these processes of practical wisdom. So there are just ways in which parents can work together, you know, on their own time whenever, you know, this can be something that they do when they think it would be most impactful. It is just some ideas for how to work on these areas because all of them are learn-able and practice-able and I do think there are skills and just like any other skills or habits, they take more of a regular type of focus and attention to build them.

LISA REAGAN: Right and I think it is a wonderful discovery when you can go there and see you’re probably already many of these and now you have an idea of your own internal process and what that looks like and what are you going through. When you’re standing there in the moment with no path in front of you and your teenager in the middle of one of these, as you said very common, but very intense dilemmas or situations. So is there anything else that you would like to share about the wise parent study?

DAVE METLER: Well, let me think. I do imagine that the article and even this interview are really the beginning of a dialog. I would love to hear ideas from anyone who is listening or who is reading this article. It is completely on the edge of where things are at in academics and we’re trying to figure out here where to go next with it. So your feedback and just even trying to have conversations around this would really be something that I feel like would be exciting but also is part of furthering the practice and just even the dialog and the conversation around parenting and the new story of parenting.

LISA REAGAN: There is a wise parents closed group that everyone can go to on Facebook and you can either put that in our search bar or you can go to Dave’s articles on Kindred, the wise parent study article and it will have a link. You can just click on the graphic there on the page with the wisdom tree and it will take you right to the group. That will be fun. I look forward to being in that forum.

DAVE METLER: Thank you.

LISA REAGAN: Okay. Alright. I am really again so grateful again for this wonderful work and I look forward to seeing where it goes as well and I look forward to hearing from parents and professionals about using the awareness of these skills and again just the empowerment piece that it brings to us as individuals with the piece that you articulated about trust, trusting ourselves. Look what is already happening within us. Look at what we’re already capable of and our bringing into the relationship with our child and it’s not just the intention of trying to consciously parent, but some really well defined and develop-able skills that we already possess. I think that is really empowering.

DAVE METLER: I agree.

LISA REAGAN: Thank you very much, Dave.

DAVE METLER: Thank you, Lisa. I do think that it’s just been wonderful to continue to get further involved with Kindred community. Kindred community does represent to me the ecology of the child. I think that is the Kindred community. I think it is inclusive of parents, teachers, community members, grandparents, environmental forces that are not human that are effecting children and I am just glad and I feel really grateful to continue to work with everyone in the Kindred community and keep bringing the new story.

LISA REAGAN: Well, we’re here. We’ve been here, it’ll be 20 years actually this year for Families for Conscious Living, and we’re just kind of getting started. There has been a lot of just go out and be pioneers and explore the frontier and report back from so many people for so long and I really feel like we are finally getting coherence and visibility and what we are trying to articulate for this many years. Thank you so much again Dave. I look forward to talking to you again soon and thanks to all of our listeners and supporters for coming on.